DNA Methylation Landscape Reflects the Spatial Organization of Chromatin in Different Cells

The relationship between DNA methylation and chromatin structure is still largely unknown. By analyzing a large set of published sequencing data, we observed a long-range power law correlation of DNA methylation with cell class-specific scaling exponents in the range of tens of kilobases. We showed that such cell class-specific scaling exponents are caused by different patchiness of DNA methylation in different cells. By modeling the chromatin structure using high-resolution chromosome conformation capture data and mapping the methylation level onto the modeled structure, we demonstrated that the patchiness of DNA methylation is related to chromatin structure.

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