Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
Epigenetics. 2011 Jul;6(7):920-7. doi: 10.4161/epi.6.7.16079.
The placenta acts not only as a conduit of nutrient and waste exchange between mother and developing fetus, but also functions as a regulator of the intrauterine environment. Recent work has identified changes in the expression of candidate genes, often through epigenetic alteration, which alter the placenta's function and impact fetal growth. In this study, we used the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation27 BeadChip array to examine genome-wide DNA methylation patterns in 206 term human placentas. Semi-supervised recursively partitioned mixture modeling was implemented to identify specific patterns of placental DNA methylation that could differentially classify intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) and small for gestational age (SGA) placentas from appropriate for gestational age (AGA) placentas, and these associations were validated in a masked testing series of samples. Our work demonstrates that patterns of DNA methylation in human placenta are reliably and significantly associated with infant growth and serve as a proof of principle that methylation status in the human term placenta can function as a marker for the intrauterine environment, and could potentially play a critical functional role in fetal development.
胎盘不仅是母体和发育中胎儿之间营养物质和废物交换的通道，还作为调节子宫内环境的器官发挥作用。最近的研究已经确定了候选基因表达的变化，这些变化通常通过表观遗传改变，改变胎盘的功能并影响胎儿的生长。在这项研究中，我们使用 Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation27 BeadChip 阵列检查了 206 个足月人类胎盘的全基因组 DNA 甲基化模式。实施了半监督递归分区混合建模，以识别胎盘 DNA 甲基化的特定模式，这些模式可以将宫内生长受限（IUGR）和小于胎龄儿（SGA）胎盘与适当胎龄（AGA）胎盘区分开来，并在掩蔽测试系列样本中验证了这些关联。我们的工作表明，人类胎盘中的 DNA 甲基化模式与婴儿生长可靠且显著相关，并证明了人类足月胎盘中的甲基化状态可以作为子宫内环境的标志物，并且可能在胎儿发育中发挥关键的功能作用。
