Record Details

Reference-free cell mixture adjustments in analysis of DNA methylation data

ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

Field Value
Title Reference-free cell mixture adjustments in analysis of DNA methylation data
Names Houseman, Eugene Andres (creator)
Molitor, John (creator)
Marsit, Carmen J. (creator)
Date Issued 2014-05-15 (iso8601)
Note This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the author(s) and published by Oxford University Press. The published article can be found at: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/.
Abstract MOTIVATION: Recently there has been increasing interest in the effects
of cell mixture on the measurement of DNA methylation, specifically
the extent to which small perturbations in cell mixture proportions can
register as changes in DNA methylation. A recently published set of
statistical methods exploits this association to infer changes in cell
mixture proportions, and these methods are presently being applied
to adjust for cell mixture effect in the context of epigenome-wide association
studies. However, these adjustments require the existence
of reference datasets, which may be laborious or expensive to collect.
For some tissues such as placenta, saliva, adipose or tumor tissue, the
relevant underlying cell types may not be known.
RESULTS: We propose a method for conducting epigenome-wide association
studies analysis when a reference dataset is unavailable,
including a bootstrap method for estimating standard errors. We demonstrate
via simulation study and several real data analyses that our
proposed method can perform as well as or better than methods that
make explicit use of reference datasets. In particular, it may adjust for
detailed cell type differences that may be unavailable even in existing
reference datasets.
AVAILABILITY and IMPLEMENTATION: Software is available in the R
package RefFreeEWAS. Data for three of four examples were
obtained from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), accession numbers
GSE37008, GSE42861 and GSE30601, while reference data were
obtained from GEO accession number GSE39981.
Genre Article
Access Condition http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
Identifier Houseman, E. A., Molitor, J., & Marsit, C. J. (2014). Reference-free cell mixture adjustments in analysis of DNA methylation data. Bioinformatics, 30(10), 1431-1439. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu029

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