Affinito, Ornella (2016) A novel qualitative approach to analyse DNA methylation data from Deep Bisulfite Amplicon Sequencing (Deep- Bis). [Tesi di dottorato]

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Item Type: Tesi di dottorato
Resource language: English
Title: A novel qualitative approach to analyse DNA methylation data from Deep Bisulfite Amplicon Sequencing (Deep- Bis)
Creators:
Creators
Email
Affinito, Ornella
ornella.affinito@gmail.com
Date: 31 March 2016
Number of Pages: 101
Institution: Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Department: Medicina Molecolare e Biotecnologie Mediche
Scuola di dottorato: Biotecnologie
Dottorato: Biologia computazionale e bioinformatica
Ciclo di dottorato: 28
Coordinatore del Corso di dottorato:
nome
email
Cocozza, Sergio
cocozza@unina.it
Tutor:
nome
email
Cocozza, Sergio
UNSPECIFIED
Miele, Gennaro
UNSPECIFIED
Date: 31 March 2016
Number of Pages: 101
Keywords: DNA methylation, qualitative analysis, pipeline, methylation class, epiallele
Settori scientifico-disciplinari del MIUR: Area 01 - Scienze matematiche e informatiche > INF/01 - Informatica
Area 06 - Scienze mediche > MED/03 - Genetica medica
Date Deposited: 13 Apr 2016 20:48
Last Modified: 31 Oct 2016 09:25
URI: http://www.fedoa.unina.it/id/eprint/10952

Collection description

DNA methylation is involved in a broad range of biological processes. Traditional quantitative approach summarises DNA methylation data as average percentage of methylated CpGs in specific genomic regions, or as methylation percentage for single CpG site. Such kind of approach gives important information on the general relationships between methylation and expression but might be not able to describe the complex epigenetic structure and dynamics within a cell population. Indeed, this approach fails to dissect and recognise different DNA methylation patterns when a heterogeneous population is investigated. In the present work, in order to better decode epigenetic data, a new way to analyse DNA methylation, based on qualitative approach, was developed. The qualitative approach allows methylation profiles of cell populations to be studied at the single molecule level, thus providing an added value to the quantitative one. In order to obtain an effective representation of methylation profiles, it has been used the Deep Bisulfite Amplicon Sequencing (Deep- Bis), which allows to obtain a very high coverage of selected loci. AmpliMethProfiler, a python-based pipeline, was developed to process the high number of sequences and to extract CpG methylation profiles at single molecule level from Deep- Bis data. Several tools borrowed from ecology and population genetics were used to describe the methylation landscape of the samples in terms of epialleles composition. Qualitative approach was applied on two experimental models: mouse development and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) progression before and after the demethylating therapy, in order to describe the methylation and demethylation dynamics, to investigate the epialleles distribution, to follow their evolution and to gain insight on epigenetic heterogeneity degree at specific loci. The tracking of the methylation profiles is more faithful to the epigenetic state of different loci and allows a more detailed overview of the methylation landscape in a tissue, which is composed by a mosaics of epigenetically different cells.

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