Chemical approach toward efficient DNA methylation analysis.

The development of a reaction for the detection of the presence/absence of one methyl group in a very long DNA strand is a chemically and biologically challenging research subject. Several newly designed chemical assays for the typing of DNA methylation are reported and discussed in this paper. A new concept of sequence-specific short-term methylation analysis, supported by a chemical basis, is the starting point for a novel methylation-typing assay, which will supersede conventional methods.