Background Optimizing productivity and growth of recombinant Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells requires insight and intervention in regulatory processes. This is to some extent accomplished by several ‘omics’ approaches. However, many questions remain unanswered and bioprocess development is therefore still partially empirical. In this regard, the analysis of DNA methylation as one of the earli...

X chromosome inactivation involves multiple levels of chromatin modification, established progressively and in a stepwise manner during early development. The chromosomal protein Smchd1 was recently shown to play an important role in DNA methylation of CpG islands (CGIs), a late step in the X inactivation pathway that is required for long-term maintenance of gene silencing. Here we show that in...

Vertebrate DNA can be chemically modified by methylation of the 5 position of the cytosine base in the context of CpG dinucleotides. This modification creates a binding site for MBD (methyl-CpG-binding domain) proteins which target chromatin-modifying activities that are thought to contribute to transcriptional repression and maintain heterochromatic regions of the genome. In contrast with DNA ...

The computational aspects of the problem in this paper involve, firstly, selective mapping of methylated DNA clones according to methylation level and, secondly, extracting motif information from all the mapped elements in the absence of prior probability distribution. Our novel implementation of algorithms to map and maximize expectation in this setting has generated data that appear to be dis...

Epigenetic alterations caused by viral oncoproteins are strong initiation factors for cancer development, but their mechanisms are largely unknown. To identify the epigenetic effects of viral hepatitis B virus X (HBx) that lead to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), we profiled the DNA methylomes of normal and HBx transgenic mouse liver. Intriguingly, severe hypomethylation of intragenic CpG island...

TET1 oxidizes methylated cytosine into 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), resulting in regulation of DNA methylation and gene expression. Full length TET1 (TET1FL) has a CXXC domain that binds to unmethylated CpG islands (CGIs). This CXXC domain allows TET1 to protect CGIs from aberrant methylation, but it also limits its ability to regulate genes outside of CGIs. Here, we report a novel isoform o...

Acquired drug resistance represents a frequent obstacle which hampers efficient chemotherapy of cancers. The contribution of aberrant DNA methylation to the development of drug resistant tumor cells has gained increasing attention over the past decades. Hence, the objective of the presented study was to characterize DNA methylation changes which arise from treatment of tumor cells with the chem...

Ten Eleven Translocation (TET) protein-catalyzed 5mC oxidation not only creates novel DNA modifications, such as 5hmC, but also initiates active or passive DNA demethylation. TETs' role in the crosstalk with specific histone modifications, however, is largely elusive. Here, we show that TET2-mediated DNA demethylation plays a primary role in the de novo establishment and maintenance of H3K4me3/...

Aberrant methylations in human gastric cancers were searched for by a genome scanning technique, methylation-sensitive representational difference analysis. Nine CpG islands (CGIs) in the 5' regions of nine genes, LOX, HRASLS, bA305P22.2.3, FLNc (gamma-filamin/ABPL), HAND1, a homologue of RIKEN 2210016F16, FLJ32130, PGAR (HFARP/ANGPTL4/ARP4), and thrombomodulin, were found to be methylated in t...