Erratum to: DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types

摘要

I recently described an epigenetic biomarker of agingbased on DNA methylation (DNAm) levels [1]. Unfortu-nately, I made a software coding error in my analysis ofthe cancer data, but not of the non-cancer tissue data.The error effectively added an offset term to the age esti-mates. All of my results from [1] that involve non-cancerous tissue or cancer cell lines remain valid but Ihave to report some corrections for the cancer tissuedata. In particular, I have to retract the statement thatcancer is associated with an increased DNA methylationage (i.e. positive age acceleration) in most cancer types.In fact, while some cancer types show positive age accel-eration, others exhibit negative age acceleration. I deeplyregret this software coding error. The error arose fromme using the wrong age calibration function for the can-cer tissue data sets, which led to a systematic over-estimation of DNA methylation age (Figure 1).