Cell type-specific genome scans of DNA methylation divergence indicate an important role for transposable elements.

In population genomics, genetic diversity measures play an important role in genome scans for divergent sites. In population epigenomics, comparable tools are rare although the epigenome can vary at several levels of organization. We propose a model-free, information-theoretic approach, the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD), as a flexible diversity index for epigenomic diversity.