Division of Human Cancer Genetics, Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics, Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Epigenomics. 2009 Dec;1(2):331-45. doi: 10.2217/epi.09.31.
Metastable and somatically heritable patterns of DNA methylation provide an important level of genomic regulation. In this article, we review methods for analyzing these genome-wide epigenetic patterns and offer a perspective on the ever-expanding literature, which we hope will be useful for investigators who are new to this area. The historical aspects that we cover will be helpful in interpreting this literature and we hope that our discussion of the newest analytical methods will stimulate future progress. We emphasize that no single approach can provide a complete view of the overall methylome, and that combinations of several modalities applied to the same sample set will give the clearest picture. Given the unexpected epigenomic patterns and new biological principles, as well as new disease markers, that have been uncovered in recent studies, it is likely that important discoveries will continue to be made using genome-wide DNA methylation profiling.
DNA 甲基化的亚稳态和体遗传性模式为基因组调控提供了一个重要层面。在本文中，我们回顾了分析这些全基因组表观遗传模式的方法，并对不断扩展的文献提供了一个视角，希望这对该领域的新手研究人员有所帮助。我们涵盖的历史方面将有助于解释这些文献，我们希望对最新分析方法的讨论将激发未来的进展。我们强调，没有单一的方法可以提供对整个甲基组的完整视图，并且将几种模态应用于同一组样本将给出最清晰的图像。考虑到最近的研究中发现的意外的表观基因组模式和新的生物学原理以及新的疾病标志物，使用全基因组 DNA 甲基化分析很可能会继续有重要的发现。
