| Literature DB >> 24656863 |
Yun Liu1, Xin Li1, Martin J Aryee2, Tomas J Ekström3, Leonid Padyukov4, Lars Klareskog4, Amy Vandiver1, Ann Zenobia Moore5, Toshiko Tanaka5, Luigi Ferrucci5, M Daniele Fallin6, Andrew P Feinberg7.
Abstract
Epigenetic marks such as DNA methylation have generated great interest in the study of human disease. However, studies of DNA methylation have not established population-epigenetics principles to guide design, efficient statistics, or interpretation. Here, we show that the clustering of correlated DNA methylation at CpGs was similar to that of linkage-disequilibrium (LD) correlation in genetic SNP variation but for much shorter distances. Some clustering of methylated CpGs appeared to be genetically driven. Further, a set of correlated methylated CpGs related to a single SNP-based LD block was not always physically contiguous-segments of uncorrelated methylation as long as 300 kb could be interspersed in the cluster. Thus, we denoted these sets of correlated CpGs as GeMes, defined as potentially noncontiguous methylation clusters under the control of one or more methylation quantitative trait loci. This type of correlated methylation structure has implications for both biological functions of DNA methylation and for the design, analysis, and interpretation of epigenome-wide association studies.Entities:
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Year: 2014 PMID： 24656863 PMCID： PMC3980524 DOI： 10.1016/j.ajhg.2014.02.011
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Am J Hum Genet ISSN： 0002-9297 Impact factor: 11.025