Capture MRE-seq for methylation analysis of highly degraded DNA samples

Understanding the impact of DNA methylation within different disease contexts often requires accurate assessment of these modifications in a genome-wide fashion. Frequently, patient-derived tissue stored in long-term hospital tissue banks have been preserved using formalin-fixation paraffin-embedding (FFPE). While these samples can comprise valuable resources for studying disease, the fixation process ultimately compromises the DNA’s integrity and leads to degradation. Degraded DNA can complicate CpG methylome profiling using traditional techniques, particularly when performing methylation sensitive restriction enzyme sequencing (MRE-seq), yielding high backgrounds and resulting in lowered library complexity. Here, we provide results using our new MRE-seq protocol (Capture MRE-seq), tailored to preserving unmethylated CpG information when using samples with highly degraded DNA. The results using Capture MRE-seq correlate well (0.92) with traditional MRE-seq calls when profiling non-degraded samples, and can recover unmethylated regions in highly degraded samples when traditional MRE-seq fails, which we validate using bisulfite sequencing-based data (WGBS) as well as methylated DNA immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (MeDIP-seq). Data generated for this study include: GM12878 traditional MRE-seq, GM12878 Capture MRE-seq, GM12878 (1 min degredation) Capture MRE-seq, GM12878 (10 min deg) Capture MRE-seq, GM12878 MeDIP-seq, FFPE lung sample Capture MRE-seq, and FFPE lung sample MeDIP-seq