Genome-wide DNA Methylation Profiling

Methylation profiling has been conducted on DNA samples using the Illumina Methylation EPIC BeadChip which integrates over 850,000 Methylation sites across the genome. A five hundred–nanogram samples of whole-blood DNA from 1,175 persons were treated with sodium bisulfite using the EZ96 DNA methylation kit (Zymo Research, Irvine, CA, USA) following the manufacturer’s standard protocol. DNA methylation was assessed using the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylationEPIC BeadChip kit (Illumina, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) [42 (link)]. Raw signal intensities were pre-processed, normalised, and converted into β values using the Bioconductor bigmelon package [43 (link)].