Comparative analysis of short-term herbivory stress response of DNA methylation in Populas Nigra italica

For studying methylation variation, Bisulfite sequencing technologies are extensively used for analyzing effect of environmental stress or understanding a population structure. WGBS and RRBS are two most used and developed approaches that have been used after the advancement of the next generation sequencing era. Due to having multiple approaches with different strengths and weaknesses, there need to quantitative assessment that the yielded analysis are results and comparable. Also, the comparative evaluation can provide us insight into the convenience and limitations of these approaches and allow to focus on areas that need to be improved. We have aimed to achieve three objectives in this study, i. Evaluation of global patterns of experimental group using RRBS (epiGBS) and WGBS ii. Comparison among the DMCs (type and specificity) captured by epiGBS (Denovo and Reference branch) and WGBS for insect and artificial herbivory exposure? ii. Assessment of bias in captured methylation variation by epiGBS in different genomic feature in comparison with WGBS method. Our finding showed epiGBS can be very useful tool to provide comparable output on general methylation patterns (biological context) and captured DMCs are representative but not for all contexts. Understanding the outcome of epiGBS and comparing it with WGBS could be beneficial to not only validate the effectiveness of the method for ecological experimental set up or species with larger genome in a cost-effective way but also it has diversified prospects of unrevealing global epigenetic patterns of diverse environmental conditions.