McCormick, Helen and Young, Paul E and Hur, Suzy S J and Booher, Keith and Chung, Hunter and Cropley, Jennifer E and Giannoulatou, Eleni and Suter, Catherine M (2017) Isogenic mice exhibit sexually-dimorphic DNA methylation patterns across multiple tissues. BMC Genomics, 18 (1). pp.1-9. ISSN 1471-2164 (OA)
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Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Cytosine methylation is a stable epigenetic modification of DNA that plays an important role in both normal physiology and disease. Most diseases exhibit some degree of sexual dimorphism, but the extent to which epigenetic states are influenced by sex is understudied and poorly understood. To address this deficit we studied DNA methylation patterns across multiple reduced representation bisulphite sequencing datasets (from liver, heart, brain, muscle and spleen) derived from isogenic male and female mice.
RESULTS:
DNA methylation patterns varied significantly from tissue to tissue, as expected, but they also varied between the sexes, with thousands of sexually dimorphic loci identified. The loci affected were largely autonomous to each tissue, even within tissues derived from the same germ layer. At most loci, differences between genders were driven by females exhibiting hypermethylation relative to males; a proportion of these differences were independent of the presence of testosterone in males. Loci harbouring gender differences were clustered in ontologies related to tissue function.
CONCLUSIONS:
Our findings suggest that gender is underwritten in the epigenome in a tissue-specific and potentially sex hormone-independent manner. Gender-specific epigenetic states are likely to have important implications for understanding sexually dimorphic phenotypes in health and disease.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
| Subjects: | R Medicine > R Medicine (General) |
| Depositing User: | Repository Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Dec 2017 00:42 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Dec 2017 00:42 |
| URI: | https://eprints.victorchang.edu.au/id/eprint/676 |
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