About the Authors

DunFa Peng

Affiliation Department of Surgery, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Tian-Ling Hu

Affiliation Department of Surgery, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Aixiang Jiang

Affiliation Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Mary Kay Washington

Affiliation Department of Pathology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Christopher A. Moskaluk

Affiliation Department of Pathology, University of Virginia Health Center, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

Regine Schneider-Stock

Affiliation Department of Pathology, Erlangen University, Erlangen Germany

Wael El-Rifai

wael.el-rifai@vanderbilt.edu

Affiliations Department of Surgery, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America, Department of Cancer Biology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Wrote the paper: DFP WER. Involved in planning the experiments: DFP WER. Involved in performing experiments related to methylation and ChIP assays: DFP. Performed real time RT PCR experiments: TLH. Principal investigator and involved in the design of the study, interpretation of data, troubleshooting experiments, and supervising the work relevant to this report: WER. Participated in the writing and organization of the manuscript: WER. Analyzed and summarized the data, generated the figures and contributed in writing parts of the manuscript: DFP. Performed all formal statistical analysis: AJ. Provided several samples for the required analyses and assisted in reviewing the manuscript: MKW CAM RSS.