TERT and cancer: In an attempt to examine the power and utility of these TERT-associated signatures for cancer subtype classification and prognostic analysis, we developed a multi-omics random forest classifier using the following signatures as guides: (1) “global markers”, which consist of consensus hub genes of cell cycle/mitosis nuclear division module in WGCNA (Additional file 3: Table S3) and miR-17-92 cluster, and (2) “cancer-specific markers”, which contain TERThigh/TERTlow-specific top 20 expressed genes (including TERT) and DNA methylation probes, and the top 5 expressed miRNAs, SNPs and SCNAs.