Functional DNA methylation differences between tissues, cell types, and across individuals discovered using the M&M algorithm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
DNA methylation plays key roles in diverse biological processes such as X chromosome inactivation, transposable element repression, genomic imprinting, and tissue-specific gene expression. Sequencing-based DNA methylation profiling provides an unprecedented opportunity to map and compare complete DNA methylomes. This includes one of the most widely applied technologies for measuring DNA methylation: methylated DNA immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (MeDIP-seq), coupled with a complementary method, methylation-sensitive restriction enzyme sequencing (MRE-seq). A computational approach that integrates data from these two different but complementary assays and predicts methylation differences between samples has been unavailable. Here, we present a novel integrative statistical framework M&M (for integration of MeDIP-seq and MRE-seq) that dynamically scales, normalizes, and combines MeDIP-seq and MRE-seq data to detect differentially methylated regions. Using sample-matched whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) as a gold standard, we demonstrate superior accuracy and reproducibility of M&M compared to existing analytical methods for MeDIP-seq data alone. M&M leverages the complementary nature of MeDIP-seq and MRE-seq data to allow rapid comparative analysis between whole methylomes at a fraction of the cost of WGBS. Comprehensive analysis of nineteen human DNA methylomes with M&M reveals distinct DNA methylation patterns among different tissue types, cell types, and individuals, potentially underscoring divergent epigenetic regulation at different scales of phenotypic diversity. We find that differential DNA methylation at enhancer elements, with concurrent changes in histone modifications and transcription factor binding, is common at the cell, tissue, and individual levels, whereas promoter methylation is more prominent in reinforcing fundamental tissue identities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".