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Epigenetics

An expanding horizon for DNA methylation

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 10, pages 818–819 (2009)Cite this article

Recent years have seen great advances in genome-wide DNA methylation mapping. Lister and colleagues have now achieved a nucleotide-resolution map of the human DNA methylome in embryonic stem (ES) cells and fibroblasts. They used a method that was previously developed to characterize the methylome of Arabidopsis thaliana: bisulphite treatment of DNA, which converts unmethylated Cs to Ts, followed by deep sequencing.

The human methylomes revealed some surprises. For example, whereas most (∼99%) of the methylation in fibroblasts occurred at CG dinucleotides, as expected, in ES cells a notable proportion (∼25%) of methylcytosine residues were not in the CG context. The authors reprogrammed fibroblast cells to induced pluripotent stem cells and found that the reprogrammed cells had non-CG methylation. This suggests that non-CG methylation might be a characteristic of pluripotency. Non-CG methylation was enriched within exons and introns, and the levels of gene body non-CG methylation correlated with gene expression. Therefore, non-CG methylation might have a different function to CG methylation that warrants further investigation.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Lister, R. et al. Human DNA methylomes at base resolution show widespread epigenomic differences. Nature 14 Oct 2009 (doi:10.1038/nature08514)

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  2. Kim, M.-S. et al. DNA demethylation in hormone-induced transcriptional derepression. Nature 461, 1007–1012 (2009)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

FURTHER READING

  1. Suzuki, M. M. & Bird, A. DNA methylation landscapes: provocative insights from epigenomics. Nature Rev. Genet. 9, 465–476 (2008)

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Authors
  1. Mary Muers
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Muers, M. An expanding horizon for DNA methylation. Nat Rev Genet 10, 818–819 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2702

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