Evaluation of the Infinium Methylation 450K technology

Abstract

Aims: Studies of DNA methylomes hold enormous promise for biomedicine but are hampered by the technological challenges of analyzing many samples cost-effectively. Recently, a major extension of the previous Infinium HumanMethylation27 BeadChip® (Illumina, Inc. CA, USA), called Infinium HumanMethylation450 (Infinium Methylation 450K; Illumina, Inc. CA, USA) was developed. This upgraded technology is a hybrid of two different chemical assays, the Infinium I and Infinium II assays, allowing (for 12 samples in parallel) assessment of the methylation status of more than 480,000 cytosines distributed over the whole genome. In this article, we evaluate Infinium Methylation 450K on cell lines and tissue samples, highlighting some of its advantages but also some of its limitations. In particular, we compare the methylation values of the Infinium I and Infinium II assays. Materials & methods: We used Infinium Methylation 450K to profile: first, the well-characterized HCT116 wild-type and double-knockout cell lines ...