A framework for analyzing DNA methylation data from Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip

摘要

DNA methylation has been identified to be widely associated to complex diseases. Among biological platforms to profile DNA methylation in human, the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip (450K) has been accepted as one of the most efficient technologies. However, challenges exist in analysis of DNA methylation data generated by this technology due to widespread biases. Here we proposed a generalized framework for evaluating data analysis methods for Illumina 450K array. This framework considers the following steps towards a successful analysis: importing data, quality control, within-array normalization, correcting type bias, detecting differentially methylated probes or regions and biological interpretation. We evaluated five methods using three real datasets, and proposed outperform methods for the Illumina 450K array data analysis.