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A pan-tissue DNA methylation atlas enables in silico decomposition of human tissue methylomes at cell-type resolution
Open accessAbstract
Bulk-tissue DNA methylomes represent an average over many different cell types, hampering our understanding of cell-type-specific contributions to disease development. As single-cell methylomics is not scalable to large cohorts of individuals, cost-effective computational solutions are needed, yet current methods are limited to tissues such as blood. Here we leverage the high-resolution nature of tissue-specific single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets to construct a DNA methylation atlas defined for 13 solid tissue types and 40 cell types. We comprehensively validate this atlas in independent bulk and single-nucleus DNA methylation datasets. We demonstrate that it correctly predicts the cell of origin of diverse cancer types and discovers new prognostic associations in olfactory neuroblastoma and stage 2 melanoma. In brain, the atlas predicts a neuronal origin for schizophrenia, with neuron-specific differential DNA methylation enriched for corresponding genome-wide association study risk loci. In summary, the DNA methylation atlas enables the decomposition of 13 different human tissue types at a high cellular resolution, paving the way for an improved interpretation of epigenetic data.
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“and therefore the unique methylation profile of cells can be used to identify their tissue of origin [33, 59].”
From Comprehensive in silico CpG methylation analysis in hepatocellular carcinoma identifies tissue- and tumor-type specific marks disconnected from gene expression (2024) · cites this paper as [59]
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“it has also been described that some DNA methylation patterns are associated with specific types of cancers and therefore can be used to differentiate between various tumor types [56, 59].”
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Research works printed but not linked: 1
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Loyfer, N., Magenheim, J., Peretz, A., Cann, G., Bredno, J., Klochendler, A., Fox-Fisher, I., Shabi-Porat, S., Hecht, M., Pelet, T., et al. (2023) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05580-6 · Cited by 656
Epigenetic ageing clocks: statistical methods and emerging computational challenges
Teschendorff, A. E., & Horvath, S. (2025) · Nature Reviews Genetics · doi:10.1038/s41576-024-00807-w · Cited by 226
Self-citationscMD facilitates cell type deconvolution using single-cell DNA methylation references
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Circulating cell-free DNA-based multi-cancer early detection
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Metadata
- Authors
- Zhu, T., Liu, J., Beck, S., Pan, S., Capper, D., Lechner, M., Thirlwell, C., Breeze, C. E., & Teschendorff, A. E.
- Affiliations
- Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health (CN)
- University College London (GB)
- German Cancer Research Center (DE)
- Barts Health NHS Trust (GB)
- Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences (US)
- Corresponding author
- Breeze, Charles E.
- Teschendorff, Andrew E.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Nature Methods
- Published
- 2022-03
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 296-306
- ISSN
- 1548-7091 (ISSN-L)
- 1548-7105
- PMC
- PMC8916958
- OpenAlex
- W4221136004
- Cited by
- 103
- References
- 99
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 33 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 9
- FWCI
- 7.43
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature Methods (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation of China | National Natural Science Foundation of China-Yunnan Joint Fund (31970632)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Epigenetics and DNA Methylation
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics
- Keywords
- cell-type resolution, single-cell RNA sequencing, tumor cell of origin, olfactory neuroblastoma, melanoma, schizophrenia, neuronal origin
- MeSH terms
- Epigenome, Humans, Neurons, CpG Islands, DNA Methylation, Epigenesis, Genetic, Genome-Wide Association Study, Epigenomics
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