Review:Advances in methodology of DNA methylation assay

DNA methylation is one of the most signaficant epigenetic events which greatly influence gene activation, gene imprinting, chromatin stability, and so on. The level of methylation in genome and certain regions should be in a normal range, because any variation would cause physiological dysfunction. In account of essential roles of DNA methylation in the living system, the detection of methylation in both overall genome and specific positions has drawn great interest. So far many biological and chemical meth...     

脱氧核糖核酸甲基化分析方法在肿瘤诊断和治疗中的应用

脱氧核糖核酸( DNA)甲基化是表观遗传改变的主要作用方式,在基因表达调控、基因组印迹、胚胎发育、维持正常细胞功能等过程中起着极其重要的作用;异常甲基化可以导致肿瘤的发生、发展.因此,探讨甲基化形成与改变的可能机制,建立准确性好、灵敏度高、操作简单的DNA甲基化分析方法,可为某些肿瘤的早期诊断提供重要依据.本文综述了D...     

Quantitative analysis of DNA methylation in chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients

Changes in the genomic DNA methylation level have been found to be closely associated with tumorigenesis. In order to analyze the relation of aberrant DNA methylation to clinical and biological risk factors, we have determined the cytosine methylation level of 81 patients diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The analysis was based on DNA hydrolysis followed by derivatization of the 2'-desoxyribonucleoside-3'-monophosphates with BODIPY FL EDA. Derivatives were separated by micellar electrokinetic chromatography, and laser-induced fluorescence was used for detection. We analyzed potential correlations between DNA methylation levels and numerous patient parameters, including clinical observations and biological data. As a result, we observed a significant correlation with the immunoglobulin variable heavy chain gene (VH) mutation status. This factor has been repeatedly proposed as a reliable prognostic marker for CLL, which suggests that the methylation level might be a valuable factor in determining the prognostic outcome of CLL. We are now in the process of refining our method to broaden its application potential. In this context, we show here that the oxidation of the fluorescence marker in the samples and the evaporation of methanol in the electrolytes can be prevented by a film of paraffin oil. In summary, our results thus establish capillary electrophoresis as a valuable tool for analyzing the DNA methylation status of clinical samples.     

面向DNA甲基化修饰分析的质谱技术

DNA甲基化作为表观遗传修饰中一种重要的调控方式,通过调控基因的表达,从而影响机体内一系列的生物学过程。色谱-质谱法是研究DNA甲基化修饰的重要研究手段。随着对哺乳动物DNA甲基化的生物学功能的深入研究,应用于研究表观遗传修饰的手段与仪器设备越来越先进。为了对DNA修饰进行定性与定量的分析检测,除了高效液相色谱整合不同种类质量分析器的质谱联用（HPLC-MS）技术外,目前还开发应用了基质辅助激光解析质谱技术（MALDI-ToF-MS）和气相色谱-质谱联用技术（GC-MS）,从而极大拓展了DNA甲基化修饰研究的手段。本文对分析表观遗传DNA甲基化修饰的质谱技术发展进行综述,希望为DNA甲基化修饰分析提供有价值的研究策略。     

DEEPAligner: Deep encoding of pathways to align epigenetic signatures

Background and objectiveRecently, differential DNA Methylation is known to affect the regulatory mechanism of biological pathways. A pathway encompasses a set of interacting genes or gene products that altogether perform a given biological function. Pathways often encode strong methylation signatures that are capable of distinguishing biologically distinct subtypes. Even though Next Generation Sequencing techniques such as MeDIP-seq and MBD-isolated genome sequencing (MiGS) allow for genome-wide identification of clinical and biological subtypes, there is a pressing need for computational methods to compare epigenetic signatures across pathways.MethodsA novel alignment method, called DEEPAligner (Deep Encoded Epigenetic Pathway Aligner), is proposed in this paper that finds functionally consistent and topologically sound alignments of epigenetic signatures from pathway networks. A deep embedding framework is used to obtain epigenetic signatures from pathways which are then aligned for functional consistency and local topological similarity.ResultsExperiments on four benchmark cancer datasets reveal epigenetic signatures that are conserved in cancer-specific and across-cancer subtypes.ConclusionThe proposed deep embedding framework obtains highly coherent signatures that are aligned for biological as well as structural orthology. Comparison with state-of-the-art network alignment methods clearly suggest that the proposed method obtains topologically and functionally more consistent alignments.Availabilityhttp://bdbl.nitc.ac.in/DEEPAligner     

o-nitrobenzenesulfonamides in nucleoside synthesis: efficient 5'-aziridination of adenosine

5'-Aziridinoadenylates of the form 1 and a related nitrogen mustard variant have been constructed using a novel variation of the Mitsunobu reaction. Such molecules allow conversion of biological methyltransferases into nucleoside transferases, thus providing powerful tools for investigating S-adenosyl-l-methionine (SAM)-dependent methylation. We present here a highly effective synthesis of such molecules that is amenable to aziridine diversification as well as elaboration of the base moiety so as to afford "bumped" cofactor mimics compatible with "hole"-bearing mutant proteins.     

DNA methylation-regulated microRNA pathways in ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma: A meta-analysis

Epigenetic regulation has been linked to the initiation and progression of cancer. Aberrant expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) is one such mechanism that can activate or silence oncogenes (OCGs) and tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) in cells. A growing number of studies suggest that miRNA expression can be regulated by methylation modification, thus triggering cancer development. However, there is no comprehensive in silico study concerning miRNA regulation by direct DNA methylation in cancer. Ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma (OSC) was therefore chosen as a tumor model for the present work.Twelve batches of OSC data, with at least 35 patient samples in each batch, were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. The Spearman rank correlation coefficient (SRCC) was used to quantify the correlation between the CpG DNA methylation level and miRNA expression level. Meta-analysis was performed to reduce the effects of biological heterogeneity among different batches. MiRNA-target interactions were also inferred by computing SRCC and meta-analysis to assess the correlation between miRNA expression and cancer-associated gene expression and the interactions were further validated by a query against the miRTarBase database.A total of 26 potential epigenetic-regulated miRNA genes that can target OCGs or TSGs in OSC were found to show biological relevance between DNA methylation and miRNA gene expression. Furthermore, some of the identified DNA-methylated miRNA genes; for instance, the miR-200 family, were previously identified as epigenetic-regulated miRNAs and correlated with poor survival of ovarian cancer. We also found that several miRNA target genes, BTG3, NDN, HTRA3, CDC25A, and HMGA2 were also related to the poor outcomes in ovarian cancer.The present study proposed a systematic strategy to construct highly confident epigenetic-regulated miRNA pathways for OSC. The findings are validated and are in line with the literature. The inclusion of direct DNA methylated miRNA events may offer another layer of explanation that along with genetics can give a better understanding of the carcinogenesis process.