Comparative analysis of human and mouse CpG islands using dbCGI

DNA methylation and histone modifications form the epigenetic code. Cytosine methylation maintains an inactive-condensed chromatin state and is involved in many cellular events such as gene expression, chromosomal stability, cell differentiation, and carcinogenesis. CpG islands (CGIs), which are stretches of DNA in vertebrate organisms with an over-representation of the CpG dinucleotide, are naturally unmethylated and play an important role in gene repression. There is a lack, however, of a CGI database that provides a comprehensive genome-wide analysis of the distribution and annotation of CGIs across organisms. We introduce dbCGI, a web-application that identifies, annotates, and analyzes CGIs. We performed individual genome-wide analysis of human and mouse CGIs in addition to a comparative analysis of the two organisms' CGIs using homologue gene pairs.