Enhancers act as cis-regulatory elements, controlling the expression of genes according to developmental stages, external signalling, and cell states. Recent studies have shown the impact of perturbation of enhancer activity on expression of genes and cell properties. However, at the same time, perturbation of many enhancers does not always show substantial effect on the expression of genes or properties of cells. Hence, there is a need to identify enhancers that can be effectively targeted for therapeutics and understanding regulation. Therefore, a comprehensive resource containing information on the effect of knockdown of enhancers is needed. Here, we introduce a database ePerturbDB, which provides resources to search the effects of 83 743 experimental perturbations of enhancers. The ePerturbDB database allows users to compare their genomic loci to the list of perturbed enhancers to know their potential effect. It also provides enriched genes and ontology terms for query enhancer location overlapping with a known experimentally perturbed enhancer list. Thus, the resource and tool in ePerturbDB can help users build hypotheses and design experiments to find effective enhancer-based therapeutics and inferences about the regulation of cell states. Database URL: http://reggen.iiitd.edu.in:1207/ePerturbDB-html/.
Maurya et al. (Thu,) studied this question.