Dissecting features of epigenetic variants underlying cardiometabolic risk using full-resolution epigenome profiling in regulatory elements.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30872577.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-09184-z and PMC identifier 6418220.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Sparse profiling of CpG methylation in blood by microarrays has identified epigenetic links to common diseases. Here we apply methylC-capture sequencing (MCC-Seq) in a clinical population of ~200 adipose tissue and matched blood samples (N<sub>total</sub>~400), providing high-resolution methylation profiling (>1.3 M CpGs) at regulatory elements. We link methylation to cardiometabolic risk through associations to circulating plasma lipid levels and identify lipid-associated CpGs with unique localization patterns in regulatory elements. We show distinct features of tissue-specific versus tissue-independent lipid-linked regulatory regions by contrasting with parallel assessments in ~800 independent adipose tissue and blood samples from the general population. We follow-up on adipose-specific regulatory regions under (1) genetic and (2) epigenetic (environmental) regulation via integrational studies. Overall, the comprehensive sequencing of regulatory element methylomes reveals a rich landscape of functional variants linked genetically as well as epigenetically to plasma lipid traits.
Medical subject headings
- Cardiovascular Diseases
- CpG Islands
- Epigenesis, Genetic
- Metabolic Diseases
- Regulatory Sequences, Nucleic Acid