Longitudinal study of the human sperm methylome aging through whole-genome bisulfite sequencing

The average age of fatherhood has increased in recent years. Various genetic diseases are also known to be more likely in children with older fathers. This leads to a need to investigate age-related changes to the sperm DNA. The sperm methylome can be used to accurately predict fertility and embryo viability, and it also changes continuously with age. To date, most population studies that investigate age-related changes to the sperm methylome use microarrays, which are less expensive but, compared to sequencing-based approaches, investigate the methylome at much lower spatial resolution. We generated whole-genome bisulfite sequencing of sperm DNA for 10 donors. For each donor, two samples were collected, separated by 10 to 18 years.