Blood Brain DNA Methylation Comparison Tool

Eilis Hannon¹, Katie Lunnon¹, Leonard Schalkwyk³ and Jonathan Mill^1,2

1. University of Exeter Medical School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
2. Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK
3. School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

While it is widely acknowledged that the choice of a relevant tissue is imperative for the biological interpretation of epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS), obtaining such samples, particularly in the numbers required to overcome the multiple testing burden of testing loci genome-wide, can be challenging. This is true for studies of brain disorders, such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and autism, where often alternative, easily obtainable peripheral tissues such as blood or buccal samples are used instead. In order to establish the relevance of associated loci, these are subsequently followed up in available cohorts of brain tissue. Here we introduce an online tool which allows the user to perform this secondary analysis by investigating the correlation of DNA methylation in blood with four brain regions (prefrontal cortex, entorhinal cortex, superior temporal gyrus and cerebellum) from 71-75 matched samples for all probes present on the Illumina 450K Beadchip array.

Search the data:

Enter an Illumina 450K probe name to get a plot for it

Enter a gene name for plots of its annotated probes:

Selection of probes from the manuscript

Supplementary Tables from manuscript