mist

Epigenetics
R
MIT + file LICENSE

mist (Methylation Inference for Single-cell along Trajectory) is a hierarchical Bayesian framework for modeling DNA methylation trajectories and performing differential methylation (DM) analysis in single-cell DNA methylation (scDNAm) data. It estimates developmental-stage-specific variations, identifies genomic features with drastic changes along pseudotime, and, for two phenotypic groups, detects features with distinct temporal methylation patterns. mist uses Gibbs sampling to estimate parameters for temporal changes and stage-specific variations.

Source attribution

  • Bioconductormist

Related resources

This package implements an approach for scanning the genome to detect and perform accurate inference on differentially methylated regions from Whole Genome Bisulfite Sequencing data. The method is based on comparing detected regions to a pooled null distribution, that can be implemented even when as few as two samples per population are available. Region-level statistics are obtained by fitting a generalized least squares (GLS) regression model with a nested autoregressive correlated error structure for the effect of interest on transformed methylation proportions.

High-throughput single-cell measurements of DNA methylomes can quantify methylation heterogeneity and uncover its role in gene regulation. However, technical limitations and sparse coverage can preclude this task. scMET is a hierarchical Bayesian model which overcomes sparsity, sharing information across cells and genomic features to robustly quantify genuine biological heterogeneity. scMET can identify highly variable features that drive epigenetic heterogeneity, and perform differential methylation and variability analyses. We illustrate how scMET facilitates the characterization of epigenetically distinct cell populations and how it enables the formulation of novel hypotheses on the epigenetic regulation of gene expression.

The cfTools R package provides methods for cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation data analysis to facilitate cfDNA-based studies. Given the methylation sequencing data of a cfDNA sample, for each cancer marker or tissue marker, we deconvolve the tumor-derived or tissue-specific reads from all reads falling in the marker region. Our read-based deconvolution algorithm exploits the pervasiveness of DNA methylation for signal enhancement, therefore can sensitively identify a trace amount of tumor-specific or tissue-specific cfDNA in plasma. cfTools provides functions for (1) cancer detection: sensitively detect tumor-derived cfDNA and estimate the tumor-derived cfDNA fraction (tumor burden); (2) tissue deconvolution: infer the tissue type composition and the cfDNA fraction of multiple tissue types for a plasma cfDNA sample. These functions can serve as foundations for more advanced cfDNA-based studies, including cancer diagnosis and disease monitoring.

EpiMix is a comprehensive tool for the integrative analysis of high-throughput DNA methylation data and gene expression data. EpiMix enables automated data downloading (from TCGA or GEO), preprocessing, methylation modeling, interactive visualization and functional annotation.To identify hypo- or hypermethylated CpG sites across physiological or pathological conditions, EpiMix uses a beta mixture modeling to identify the methylation states of each CpG probe and compares the methylation of the experimental group to the control group.The output from EpiMix is the functional DNA methylation that is predictive of gene expression. EpiMix incorporates specialized algorithms to identify functional DNA methylation at various genetic elements, including proximal cis-regulatory elements of protein-coding genes, distal enhancers, and genes encoding microRNAs and lncRNAs.

High-throughput single-cell measurements of DNA methylation allows studying inter-cellular epigenetic heterogeneity, but this task faces the challenges of sparsity and noise. We present vmrseq, a statistical method that overcomes these challenges and identifies variably methylated regions accurately and robustly.

This package contains R functions to predict biological variables to from placnetal DNA methylation data generated from infinium arrays. This includes inferring ethnicity/ancestry, gestational age, and cell composition from placental DNA methylation array (450k/850k) data.