The dynamics of DNA methylation fidelity during mouse embryonic stem cell self-renewal and differentiation.

The faithful transmission of DNA methylation patterns through cell divisions is essential for the daughter cells to retain a proper cell identity. To achieve a comprehensive assessment of methylation fidelity, we implemented a genome-scale hairpin bisulfite sequencing approach to generate methylation data for DNA double strands simultaneously. We show here that methylation fidelity increases globally during differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs), and is particularly high in the promoter regions of actively expressed genes and positively correlated with active histone modification marks and binding of transcription factors.

DMEAS: DNA methylation entropy analysis software.

Summary: DMEAS is the first user-friendly tool dedicated to analyze the distribution of DNA methylation patterns for the quantification of epigenetic heterogeneity. It supports the analysis of both locus-specific and genome-wide bisulfite sequencing data. DMEAS progressively scans the mapping results of bisulfite sequencing reads to extract DNA methylation patterns for contiguous CpG dinucleotides.

[Variant fusion transcripts and genomic DNA breakpoint of sil-tal1 in T-ALL cells].

The aim of this study was to investigate the nucleotide sequence of one distinct fusion transcript of sil-tal1 in childhood T-ALL. The PCR product was cloned into plasmid vector and then sequenced. Genomic DNA was analyzed with PCR using the designed primer pairs representing distinct sequences.