Project description:Background: Researching the murine epigenome in disease models has been hampered by the lack of an appropriate and cost-effective DNA methylation array. Until recently, investigators have been limited to the relatively expensive and analysis intensive bisulphite sequencing methods. Here, we performed a comprehensive, comparative analysis between the new Mouse Methylation BeadChip (MMB) and reduced representation bisulphite sequencing (RRBS) in two murine models of colorectal carcinogenesis, providing insight into the utility to each platforms in a real world environment. Results: We captured 1.47x106 CpGs by RRBS and 2.64x105 CpGs by MMB, mapping to 13,778 and 13,365 CpG islands, respectively. RRBS captured significantly more CpGs per island (median 41 for RRBS versus 2 for MMB). We found that 64.4% of intra-island CpG methylation variability can be captured by measuring approximately one quarter of CpG island (CGI) CpGs. MMB was more precise in measuring DNA methylation, especially at sites that had low RRBS coverage. This impacted differential methylation analysis, with more statistically significantly differentially methylated CpG sites identified by MMB in all experimental conditions, however the difference was minute when appropriate thresholding for the magnitude of methylation change (0.2 beta value difference) was applied, providing confidence that both techniques can identify similar differential DNA methylation. Gene ontology enrichment analysis of differentially hypermethylated gene promoters identified similar biological processes and pathways by both RRBS and MMB across two murine model systems. Conclusion: MMB is an effective tool for profiling the murine methylome that performs comparably to RRBS, identifying similar differentially methylated pathways. Although MMB captures a similar proportion of CpG islands, it does so with fewer CpGs per island. We show that subsampling informative CpGs from CpG islands is an appropriate strategy to capture whole island variation. Choice of technology is experiment dependent and will be predicated on the underlying biology being probed.

Project description:Cytosine methylation is an important DNA epigenetic modification. In vertebrates, methylation occurs at CpG sites, which are dinucleotides where a cytosine is immediately followed by a guanine in the DNA sequence from 5' to 3'. When located in the promoter region of a gene, DNA methylation is often associated with transcriptional silencing of the gene. Aberrant DNA methylation is associated with the development of various diseases such as cancer. Bisulfite sequencing (BS-seq) is the current "gold-standard" technology for high-resolution profiling of DNA methylation. Reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) is an efficient form of BS-seq that targets CpG-rich DNA regions in order to save sequencing costs. A typical bioinformatics aim is to identify CpGs that are differentially methylated (DM) between experimental conditions. This workflow demonstrates that differential methylation analysis of RRBS data can be conducted using software and methodology originally developed for RNA-seq data. The RNA-seq pipeline is adapted to methylation by adding extra columns to the design matrix to account for read coverage at each CpG, after which the RRBS and RNA-seq pipelines are almost identical. This approach is statistically natural and gives analysts access to a rich collection of analysis tools including generalized linear models, gene set testing and pathway analysis. The article presents a complete start to finish case study analysis of RRBS profiles of different cell populations from the mouse mammary gland using the Bioconductor package edgeR. We show that lineage-committed cells are typically hyper-methylated compared to progenitor cells and this is true on all the autosomes but not the sex chromosomes. We demonstrate a strong negative correlation between methylation of promoter regions and gene expression as measured by RNA-seq for the same cell types, showing that methylation is a regulatory mechanism involved in epithelial linear commitment.

Dataset Information

Comparative analysis of Illumina Mouse Methylation BeadChip and reduced-representation bisulfite sequencing for routine DNA methylation analysis.

Publications

Comparative analysis of Illumina Mouse Methylation BeadChip and reduced-representation bisulfite sequencing for routine DNA methylation analysis.

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