Abstract
Cytosine methylations are common mechanisms of epigenetic modifications of DNA molecules which also influence gene expression and cell phenotypes. Thus, 5 methyl-cytosine is sometimes called the fifth base of the genome. The development of high throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies has – for the first time – brought about tools to investigate epigenetic alterations in a genome-wide approach. First methylation maps have already been created and it is only a question of time until complete epigenetic maps of healthy and diseased human tissues are available. Here, we summarize the use of HTS for diverse epigenetic technologies, give an overview of the status quo of methylation maps, touch bioinformatics software applications and problems and, finally, outline future perspectives for the application in oncology and basic research.
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Kerick, M., Fischer, A., Schweiger, MR. (2012). Generation and Analysis of Genome-Wide DNA Methylation Maps. In: Rodríguez-Ezpeleta, N., Hackenberg, M., Aransay, A. (eds) Bioinformatics for High Throughput Sequencing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0782-9_9
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