REGULATORY ROLE OF SINGLE CPG METHYLATION

摘要: DNA methylation is a well studied epigenetic process. Several methods have been developed to determine genome methylation at various scales, including those capturing DNA methylation with a single base resolution, such as bisulfite sequencing. Still, for a downstream analysis the most common strategy is to average methylation levels along regulatory regions, based on the assumption of the homogeneous distribution of DNA methylation within genomic regions. Despite the well known observations of unmethylated CpGs co-localized within CpG islands (CGIs) and methylated CpGs co-localized within repetitive elements, the role of single CpG methylation has also been reported. Our previous study demonstrated that a share of gene-proximal CpGs exhibited a significant negative correlation of their methylation profiles with the expression profiles of neighboring genes across various cell types. We called such …