Atherosclerosis: Cell biology and lipoproteins - Panoramic views of DNA methylation landscapes of atherosclerosis

摘要

During the last 2 years, the cardiovascular disease (CVD) field has increasingly embraced epigenomics technologies. This menage is a young one in comparison with cancer studies, in which at least a decade of epigenomics paved the way for epige-netics into the clinic [1]. The pace of epigenomics research in CVD has been significantly accelerated by the availability of affordable human DNA methylation microarrays that allow measuring the methylation status of a large number of cytosines in a CpG dinucleotide (CpG) context, which is the main substrate for DNA methyltransferase enzymes in mammalian genomes. In particular, Illumina's HumanMethylation27 BeadChip covering ~27 000 CpGs that map to ~ 14 000 promoters and its upgraded version HumanMethylation450, which represents ~480000 CpGs located in a variety of genie and intergenic sequences, have been used in a number of studies.