TAGLN emerged as a strong candidate gene among a large number of genes, as it was commonly and significantly upregulated upon AZA treatment in both MCF7 (by 27.3-fold) and MDA-MB-231 (by 1.77-fold) cell lines (Additional file 3), and our bioinformatics analyses showed that TAGLN expression was significantly downregulated (>2-fold, P < 0.05) in breast tumor tissues of 8 out of 13 (62 %) breast cancer datasets included in Oncomine database [38] (Additional file 4: Table S3). Here, TAGLN is linked to breast cancer.