A Patient-Centric Methylation Pipeline

This application note outlines the methodology implemented in the NextBio platform (Figure 1) for detecting changes in DNA methylation for data produced on the Illumina Infinium methylation assays. The method analyzes data in a patient-centric context, i.e., data are obtained for an individual patient, rather than as a batch. Therefore, the underlying analysis must be expanded to handle this complexity. The analysis pipeline is designed to compare a patient disease sample to a normal reference sample. The reference is derived from the average of a group of individual normal samples collected from patients (when available), or generated from highly correlated NextBio curated data sets from the same tissue as the disease sample.