Combined genetic and epigenetic effects on variably methylated regions

We first identified candidate VMRs, defined as regions of CpG-sites showing the highest variability across all methylation sites.To examine the factors that best explain the variance in methylation in these functionally relevant sites, we chose the CpG-site with the highest MAD-score as representative of the VMR. These CpGs are named tagCpGs. We next compared the fit of four models for each of the 3,782 tagCpGs: best SNP (G model), best environment (E model), SNP + environment (G+E model) and SNP x environment (GxE model). For each tagCpG, the model with the lowest AIC was chosen as the best model.<br><br>