Locus-specific DNA methylation analysis of retrotransposons in ES somatic and cancer cells using High-Throughput Targeted Repeat Element Bisulfite Sequencing

摘要

DNA methylation is a major epigenetic mark associated with multiple aspects of retrotransposons within the mammalian genome. In order to study DNA methylation of a large number of retrotransposons on an individual-locus basis, we have developed a new protocol termed High-Throughput Targeted Repeat Element Bisulfite Sequencing (HT-TREBS) (Ekram and Kim, 2014 [1]). We have used this technique to characterize the locus-specific patterns of DNA methylation of 4799 members of the mouse IAP LTR (Intracisternal A Particle Long Terminal Repeat) retrotransposon family in embryonic stem, somatic and Neuro2A cells (Bakshi and Kim, 2014 [2]). Here we describe in detail the sample preparation and bioinformatics analyses used for these studies. The somatic cell data may be accessed under GEO accession number . The ES and Neuro2A data are deposited under GEO accession number .