Integrative epigenetic and genetic pan-cancer somatic alteration portraits

Genetic and epigenetic alterations are required for carcinogenesis and the mutation burden across tumor types has been investigated. Here, we investigate epigenetic alterations with a novel measure of global DNA methylation dysregulation, the methylation dysregulation index (MDI), across 14 cancer types in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. DNA methylation data—obtained using Illumina HumanMethylation450 BeadChip—was accessed from TCGA. We calculated the MDI in 14 tumor types (n = 5,592 tumors), using adjacent normal tissues (n = 701) from each tumor site. Copy number alteration, and mutation burden were retrieved from cBioportal (n = 5,152). We tested the relation of subject MDI across tumors and with age, gender, tumor stage, estimated tumor purity, and copy number alterations for both overall MDI and genomic-context-specific MDI. We also investigated the top most dysregulated loci shared across tumor types. There was a broad range of extent in methylation dysregulation across tumor types (P