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Enhancers are often mutated and dysregulated in various diseases such as cancer. By integrating the function annotation of the mammalian genome (FANTOM) enhancers expression profiles and RNA-seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) of 13 cancers and their corresponding para-cancerous tissues, we systematically identified a total of 4702 significantly differentially expressed (DE) enhancers. Furthermore, a total of 1036 DE genes regulated by DE enhancers were identified. It was found that in these 13 cancers, most (61.13%) enhancers were ubiquitously expressed, whereas DE enhancers were more likely to be tissue-specific expressed, and the DE genes regulated by DE enhancers were significantly enriched in cancer-related pathways. Finally, it was manifested that 74 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were located in 37 DE enhancers, and these SNPs affected the gain and loss of functional transcription factor binding sites of 758 transcription factors, which were shown to be highly correlated with tumorigenesis and development.

Enhancers are cis-regulatory DNA elements that positively regulate the transcription of target genes in a tissue-specific manner, and dysregulation of target genes could lead to various diseases, such as cancer. Recent studies have shown that enhancers can regulate microRNAs (miRNAs) and participate in their biological synthesis. However, the network of enhancer-regulated miRNAs across multiple cancers is still unclear. Here, a total of 2,418 proximal enhancer–miRNA interactions and 1,280 distal enhancer–miRNA interactions were identified through the integration of genomic distance, co-expression, and 3D genome data in 31 cancers. The results showed that both proximal and distal interactions exhibited a significant cancer type-specific feature trend at the tissue level rather than at the single-cell level, and there was a noteworthy positive correlation between the expression of the miRNA and the number of enhancers regulating the same miRNA in most cancers. Furthermore, we found that there was a high correlation between the formation of enhancer–miRNA pairs and the expression of enhancer RNAs (eRNAs) whether in distal or proximal regulation. The characteristics analysis showed that miRes (enhancers that regulated miRNAs) and non-miRes presented significant differences in sequence conservation, guanine–cytosine (GC) content, and histone modification signatures. Notably, GC content, H3K4me1, and H3K36me3 were present differently between distal and proximal regulation, suggesting that they might participate in chromosome looping of enhancer–miRNA interactions. Finally, we introduced a case study, enhancer: chr1:1186391–1186507 ∼ miR-200a was highly relevant to the survival of thyroid cancer patients and a cis-eQTL SNP on the enhancer affected the expression of the TNFRSF18 gene as a tumor suppressor.

For the insufficient of students' innovative ability and employment ability caused by the imbalance between theory teaching and practice teaching in the process of applied undergraduate majors' personnel training, the author introduced a talent cultivation paths - the talent training mode based on the combination of professional programmatic accreditation and double certificates under the background of university-industry cooperation. The purpose is to promote balanced development of the theory teaching and practice teaching. Then, the operation mechanism of training mode was discussed from three aspects: the guarantee mechanism of alliance organization; the theory of professional competency standard system; and the cohesive mechanism of double certificate talent employment. Finally, the article introduced the successful practice of personnel training mode in engineering cost department, Tianjin University of Technology, and put forward some ideas about applied undergraduate majors' personnel training.