Title: Predicting DNA methylation level across human tissues.

Authors: Ma, Baoshan; Wilker, Elissa H; Willis-Owen, Saffron A G; Byun, Hyang-Min; Wong, Kenny C C; Motta, Valeria; Baccarelli, Andrea A; Schwartz, Joel; Cookson, William O C M; Khabbaz, Kamal; Mittleman, Murray A; Moffatt, Miriam F; Liang, Liming

Published In Nucleic Acids Res, (2014 Apr)

Abstract: Differences in methylation across tissues are critical to cell differentiation and are key to understanding the role of epigenetics in complex diseases. In this investigation, we found that locus-specific methylation differences between tissues are highly consistent across individuals. We developed a novel statistical model to predict locus-specific methylation in target tissue based on methylation in surrogate tissue. The method was evaluated in publicly available data and in two studies using the latest IlluminaBeadChips: a childhood asthma study with methylation measured in both peripheral blood leukocytes (PBL) and lymphoblastoid cell lines; and a study of postoperative atrial fibrillation with methylation in PBL, atrium and artery. We found that our method can greatly improve accuracy of cross-tissue prediction at CpG sites that are variable in the target tissue [R(2) increases from 0.38 (original R(2) between tissues) to 0.89 for PBL-to-artery prediction; from 0.39 to 0.95 for PBL-to-atrium; and from 0.81 to 0.98 for lymphoblastoid cell line-to-PBL based on cross-validation, and confirmed using cross-study prediction]. An extended model with multiple CpGs further improved performance. Our results suggest that large-scale epidemiology studies using easy-to-access surrogate tissues (e.g. blood) could be recalibrated to improve understanding of epigenetics in hard-to-access tissues (e.g. atrium) and might enable non-invasive disease screening using epigenetic profiles.

PubMed ID: 24445802

MeSH Terms: No MeSH terms associated with this publication