Calibration data EPIC array: Mouse and Rat

Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation850 BeadChip (also known as Illumina EPIC array, GPL23976) was used to generate DNA methylation data from synthetic DNA from 3 species. The DNA samples from each species were enzymatically manipulated so that they would exhibit 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% percent methylation at each CpG location, respectively. The variable “ProportionMethylated” (with ordinal values 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1) can be interpreted as a benchmark for each CpG that maps to the respective genome. Thus, the DNA methylation levels of each CpG are expected to have a high positive correlation with ProportionMethylated across the arrays measurement for the human species. The human EPIC array was applied to calibration data from mouse (n=15 EPIC arrays, 3 per methylation level) and rat (n=10, 2 per methylation level). The EPIC array data were normalized using the noob method (R function preprocessNoob in minfi). N=28 tissue samples from artifical/synthetic DNA from species. Genome annotations of the array can be downloaded from https://github.com/shorvath/MammalianMethylationConsortium