MethyLight: a high-throughput assay to measure DNA methylation
Abstract
Cytosine-5 DNA methylation occurs in the context of CpG dinucleotides in vertebrates. Aberrant methylation of CpG islands in human tumors has been shown to cause transcriptional silencing of tumor-suppressor genes. Most methods used to analyze cytosine-5 methylation patterns require cumbersome manual techniques that employ gel electrophoresis, restriction enzyme digestion, radiolabeled dNTPs or hybridization probes. The development of high-throughput technology for the analysis of DNA methylation would significantly expand our ability to derive molecular information from clinical specimens. This study describes a high-throughput quantitative methylation assay that utilizes fluorescence-based real-time PCR (TaqMan®) technology that requires no further manipulations after the PCR step. MethyLight is a highly sensitive assay, capable of detecting methylated alleles in the presence of a 10 000-fold excess of unmethylated alleles. The assay is also highly quantitative and can very accurately determine the relative prevalence of a particular pattern of DNA methylation. We show that MethyLight can distinguish between mono-allelic and bi-allelic methylation of the MLH1 mismatch repair gene in human colorectal tumor specimens. The development of this technique should considerably enhance our ability to rapidly and accurately generate epigenetic profiles of tumor samples.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Dennis Salonga and Ji Min Park for help in generating cDNAs and in designing TaqMan® oligonucleotides. This work was supported by NIH/NCI grants R01 CA 71716 (P.V.D) and R01 CA 75090 (P.W.L.). P.W.L. is a founding shareholder of ORCA Biosciences, Inc., Seattle, WA, which has a commercial interest in DNA methylation research. The research described in this paper was not supported by ORCA Biosciences.
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