Abstract DNA methylation is an inheritable biochemical process during which an enzyme (DNA methyltransferase) adds a methyl group to the 5-carbon of a CpG’s cytosine residue (a succession of a C and G on the same DNA strand). Though CpG’s are the main target of DNA methylation in mammalian genomes, CHH and CHG (H being an A, C, or T) variants exist in plants. It’s the most common epigenetic event affecting eukaryotic DNA, resulting in the alteration of gene expression and plays a crucial role in a broad range of diseases, including cancer. This work is an attempt to statistically quantify the level of methylation at every position as the percentage of methylated cytosines in a population of aligned DNA fragments.
Our project is aimed at the development of an exact method for methylation analysis in order to avhieve (i) genome-wide estimation of the methylation profile (ii) at a base-pair resolution and (iii) arbitraty precision level.
The software will be made open-source and documented with sample data and examples to make it as much user friendly as possible.