Abstract
BackgroundDNA methylation is an important epigenetic mark that can potentially link early life exposures to adverse health outcomes later in life. Host factors like sex and age strongly influence biological variation of DNA methylation, but characterization of these relationships is still limited, particularly in young children.MethodsIn a sample of 111 Mexican-American subjects (58 girls , 53 boys), we interrogated DNA methylation differences by sex at birth using the 450 K BeadChip in umbilical cord blood specimens, adjusting for cell composition.ResultsWe observed that ~3 % of CpG sites were differentially methylated between girls and boys at birth (FDR P < 0.05). Of those CpGs, 3031 were located on autosomes, and 82.8 % of those were hypermethylated in girls compared to boys. Beyond individual CpGs, we found 3604 sex-associated differentially methylated regions (DMRs) where the majority (75.8 %) had higher methylation in girls. Using pathway analysis, we found that sex-associated autosomal CpGs were significantly enriched for gene ontology terms related to nervous system development and behavior. Among hits in our study, 35.9 % had been previously reported as sex-associated CpG sites in other published human studies. Further, for replicated hits, the direction of the association with methylation was highly concordant (98.5–100 %) with previous studies.ConclusionsTo our knowledge, this is the first reported epigenome-wide analysis by sex at birth that examined DMRs and adjusted for confounding by cell composition. We confirmed previously reported trends that methylation profiles are sex-specific even in autosomal genes, and also identified novel sex-associated CpGs in our methylome-wide analysis immediately after birth, a critical yet relatively unstudied developmental window.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-015-2034-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
DNA methylation is an important epigenetic mark that can potentially link early life exposures to adverse health outcomes later in life
There is a growing interest in examining the role epigenetic marks like histone modifications, non- coding RNAs, and DNA methylation may play as biological mechanisms through which environmental exposures and other physiological and lifestyle factors can lead to disease
Epigenetic modifications are dynamic and can change over time or in response to exposures. Host factors such as sex and age contribute to interindividual differences in epigenetic markers
Summary
DNA methylation is an important epigenetic mark that can potentially link early life exposures to adverse health outcomes later in life. Previous studies of DNA methylation using the Illumina 27 K BeadChip methylation array have reported autosomal differentially methylated positions (DMPs) or CpG sites with varying methylation between males and females, providing evidence that it will be important to adjust for sex in analysis of methylation data [1,2,3,4,5,6]. These studies did not account for the existence of non-specific probes for autosomal CpGs that cross react with CpGs on sex chromosomes, thereby yielding false positives [7]. After excluding the sex-biased cross-reactive probes, they identified 184 DMPs that were associated with sex
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