Methylation of DNA, isolated from whole blood. - (Jun/08/2006 )

Hi All,

My primary area of interests are SNPs, but I would like to include to my research also some experiments with DNA methylation. I am working on a big cohort of people (2000) and have DNA of each subject isolated from WHOLE blood. My questions are:

- is there a sense to perform any DNA methylation experiment on this DNA (it comes from several cell types, so DNA methylation, promoter in particular, can be different for genes, I am interested in - so I don't know how should I interpret results),

- if there is rationale to perform such experiment, I should choose genes which plays imoprtant role in blood (e.g. antioxidant genes) but not in other tissues - am I right?

I want to perform simple case-control study (50 vs 50) - of course, general characteristic of both, cases and controls, would be the same (smoking habits, age, gender etc) with 5 genes, which seem to play important role in my research.

BTW. I would be grateful for recommending me any literature about epigenetics and DNA methylation.

Hi Snpman,

I assume that you want to study DNA methylation in diseases related to blood, right? If yes, you may find some methylation to some genes.

Having been working with DNA methylation for the past 8 years, I don't expect to see much relationship between methylation and other factors such as gender, age, smoking, etc.

Regarding methylation detecting techniques, since you have so many samples to screen, maybe MSP is the method you should use.

Hope that helps.