Epigenetics – representing an additional layer of inherited genome regulation – is emerging as a fundamentally important area of biological and medical research that has implications in our understanding of human diseases including cancer, autoimmune and neuropsychiatric disorders.
In the current tendency towards ‘big data’ science, and the accessibility of genome-wide approaches, epigenetic-related experimental datasets require bioinformatics and computational approaches to assist in data analysis, hypothesis validation and results interpretation. Furthermore, our understanding of epigenetic phenomena benefits greatly from the non-traditional computational modelling approach that aims to bring together different types of datasets, for a system’s level understanding of epigenetics.