Interespecies conservation of brain specific DNA methylation in aging and cancer

Aging is one of the main risk factors associated with the development of cancer. These two processes have been extensively investigated from the epigenetic perspective and consequently analogous epigenetic alterations have been identified for both, providing explanations on the possible molecular links between them. However, there is a need to study aging- and cancer-associated epigenetic patterns in a systematic manner to facilitate an integrated comparison between the two processes. In addition, it is essential to also confirm whether aging- and cancer-associated epigenetic alterations are equivalent in human and mouse models, as the latter are the main experimental proxy of human biology.In this study we sought to perform a systematic, integrated and intercomparable analysis of the DNA methylation dynamics associated to cancer and aging in both human and mouse. To this end, we profiled the brain methylomes of young and old, normal and tumoral brain samples from human and mouse by reduced-representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS), which provided a robust and interspecies-comparable platform for these type of analyses.