Frontiers in Physiology (Jul 2019)

Integrated Analysis of DNA Methylation and Biochemical/Metabolic Parameter During the Long-Term Isolation Environment

  • Yuan Quan,
  • Yuan Quan,
  • Yuan Quan,
  • Fengji Liang,
  • Yuexing Zhu,
  • Ying Chen,
  • Zi Xu,
  • Fang Du,
  • Ke Lv,
  • Hailong Chen,
  • Lina Qu,
  • Ruifeng Xu,
  • Hong-Yu Zhang,
  • Jianghui Xiong,
  • Jianghui Xiong,
  • Yinghui Li,
  • Yinghui Li

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00917
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

Read online

Numerous studies have shown that changes in the epigenome are an important cause of human biochemical or metabolic parameter changes. Biochemical/metabolic parameter disorders of the human body are usually closely related to the occurrence of disease. Therefore, constructing credible DNA methylation site-biochemical/metabolic parameter associations are key in interpreting the pathogenesis of diseases. However, there is a lack of research on systematic integration analysis of DNA methylation with biochemical/metabolic parameter and diseases. In this study, we attempted to use the four-people, multiple time point detected data from the long-term isolation experiment to conduct a correlation analysis. We used the biclustering algorithm FABIA to cluster the DNA methylation site-parameter correlation matrixes into 28 biclusters. The results of the biological function analysis for these biclusters were consistent with the biochemical/metabolic parameter change characteristics of the human body during long-term isolation, demonstrating the reliability of the biclusters identified by our method. In addition, from these biclusters, we obtained highly credible biochemical/metabolic parameter-disease associations, which is supported by several studies. Our results indicate that there is an overlap of biochemical/metabolic parameter-disease associations derived from a small sample, multiple time point data in healthy populations and the associations obtained from a large sample data in patients during disease development. These findings provide insights into understanding the role of the epigenome in biochemical/metabolic parameter change and disease development and has potential applications in biology and medicine research.

Keywords