Genome-wide analysis of aberrant DNA methylation for identification of potential biomarkers in colorectal cancer patients.

Background: Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Genome wide analysis studies have identified sequence mutations causing loss-of-function that are associated with disease occurrence and severity. Epigenetic modifications, such DNA methylation, have also been implicated in many cancers but have yet to be examined in the East Asian population of colorectal cancer patients.

Methods: Biopsies of tumors and matched non-cancerous tissue types were obtained and genomic DNA was isolated and subjected to the bisulphite conversion method for comparative DNA methylation analysis on the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation27 BeadChip.

Results: Totals of 258 and 74 genes were found to be hyper- and hypo-methylated as compared to the individual's matched control tissue. Interestingly, three genes that exhibited hypermethylation in their promoter regions, CMTM2, ECRG4, and SH3GL3, were shown to be significantly associated with colorectal cancer in previous studies. Using heatmap cluster analysis, eight hypermethylated and 10 hypomethylated genes were identified as significantly differentially methylated genes in the tumour tissues.

Conclusions: Genome-wide methylation profiling facilitates rapid and simultaneous analysis of cancerous cells which may help to identify methylation markers with high sensitivity and specificity for diagnosis and prognosis. Our results show the promise of the microarray technology in identification of potential methylation biomarkers for colorectal cancers.