Abstract
DNA methylation is a key regulator of gene function in a multitude of both normal and abnormal biological processes, but tools to elucidate its roles on a genome-wide scale are still in their infancy. Methylation sensitive restriction enzymes and microarrays provide a potential high-throughput, low-cost platform to allow methylation profiling. However, accurate absolute methylation estimates have been elusive due to systematic errors and unwanted variability. Previous microarray pre-processing procedures, mostly developed for expression arrays, fail to adequately normalize methylation-related data since they rely on key assumptions that are violated in the case of DNA methylation. We develop a normalization strategy tailored to DNA methylation data and an empirical Bayes percentage methylation estimator, that together yield accurate and precise absolute methylation estimates that can be compared across samples. We illustrate the method on data generated to detect methylation difference between tissues, and between normal and tumor colon samples.
Disciplines
Bioinformatics | Computational Biology
Suggested Citation
Aryee, Martin J.; Wu, Zhijin; Ladd-Acosta, Christine; Herb, Brian; Feinberg, Andrew P.; Yegnasurbramanian, Srinivasan; and Irizarry, Rafael A., "ACCURATE GENOME-SCALE PERCENTAGE DNA METHYLATION ESTIMATES FROM MICROARRAY DATA" (March 2010). Johns Hopkins University, Dept. of Biostatistics Working Papers. Working Paper 208.
https://biostats.bepress.com/jhubiostat/paper208