DNA methylation profiling in lungs tissues of smokers and patients with COPD

Epigenetics changes have been shown to be affected by cigarette smoking. It is possible that cigarette smoke (CS)-mediated DNA methylation would affect several cellular and pathophysiological processes, acute exacerbations, and comorbidity in lungs of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). We sought to determine whether genome-wide lung DNA methylation profiles of smokers and patients with COPD were significantly different from non-smokers. We isolated DNA from lung tissues of patients including 8 lifelong non-smokers, 8 current smokers, and 8 patients with COPD, and subsequently analyzed the samples using the Illumina’s Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip. We performed Genome-Wide DNA methylation analysis using lung parenchyma tissue DNA samples from Non-smokers (NS), Smokers (S) and patients with COPD (C) in 2 separate batches. In the first batch of samples, we used Sample ID# 1-4 in each of the three groups: Non-smokers (NS.1, NS.2, NS.3, NS.4), Smokers (S.1, S.2, S.3, S.4) and COPD (C.1, C.2, C.3, C.4). The second batch of samples, we used additional samples in each of the three groups (Sample ID# 5-8): Non-smokers (NS.5, NS.6, NS.7, NS.8), Smokers (S.5, S.6, S.7, S.8) and patients with COPD (C.5, C.6, C.7, C.8).