An evaluation of methods correcting for cell-type heterogeneity in DNA methylation studies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Many different methods exist to adjust for variability in cell-type mixture proportions when analyzing DNA methylation studies. Here we present the result of an extensive simulation study, built on cell-separated DNA methylation profiles from Illumina Infinium 450K methylation data, to compare the performance of eight methods including the most commonly used approaches.

Results

We designed a rich multi-layered simulation containing a set of probes with true associations with either binary or continuous phenotypes, confounding by cell type, variability in means and standard deviations for population parameters, additional variability at the level of an individual cell-type-specific sample, and variability in the mixture proportions across samples. Performance varie

SUBMITTER: McGregor K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4855979 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature