methInheritSim

Permutation analysis, based on Monte Carlo sampling, for testing the hypothesis that the number of conserved differentially methylated elements, between several generations, is associated to an effect inherited from a treatment and that stochastic effect can be dismissed.

This package implements an approach for scanning the genome to detect and perform accurate inference on differentially methylated regions from Whole Genome Bisulfite Sequencing data. The method is based on comparing detected regions to a pooled null distribution, that can be implemented even when as few as two samples per population are available. Region-level statistics are obtained by fitting a generalized least squares (GLS) regression model with a nested autoregressive correlated error structure for the effect of interest on transformed methylation proportions.

The cfTools R package provides methods for cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation data analysis to facilitate cfDNA-based studies. Given the methylation sequencing data of a cfDNA sample, for each cancer marker or tissue marker, we deconvolve the tumor-derived or tissue-specific reads from all reads falling in the marker region. Our read-based deconvolution algorithm exploits the pervasiveness of DNA methylation for signal enhancement, therefore can sensitively identify a trace amount of tumor-specific or tissue-specific cfDNA in plasma. cfTools provides functions for (1) cancer detection: sensitively detect tumor-derived cfDNA and estimate the tumor-derived cfDNA fraction (tumor burden); (2) tissue deconvolution: infer the tissue type composition and the cfDNA fraction of multiple tissue types for a plasma cfDNA sample. These functions can serve as foundations for more advanced cfDNA-based studies, including cancer diagnosis and disease monitoring.

High-throughput single-cell measurements of DNA methylation allows studying inter-cellular epigenetic heterogeneity, but this task faces the challenges of sparsity and noise. We present vmrseq, a statistical method that overcomes these challenges and identifies variably methylated regions accurately and robustly.

The R package decemedip is a novel computational paradigm developed for inferring the relative abundances of cell types and tissues measure by methylated DNA immunoprecipitation sequencing (MeDIP-Seq). This paradigm allows using reference data from other technologies such as microarray or WGBS.

TENET identifies key transcription factors (TFs) and regulatory elements (REs) linked to a specific cell type by finding significantly correlated differences in gene expression and RE DNA methylation between case and control input datasets, and identifying the top genes by number of significant RE DNA methylation site links. It also includes many tools for visualization and analysis of the results, including plots displaying and comparing methylation and expression data and methylation site link counts, survival analysis, TF motif searching in the vicinity of linked RE DNA methylation sites, custom TAD and peak overlap analysis, and UCSC Genome Browser track file generation. A utility function is also provided to download methylation, expression, and patient survival data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for use in TENET or other analyses.