Methylation Data Analysis Associated with Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer disease (AD) is associated with distinctive changes in DNA methylation patterns. DNA methylation is a chemical modification that is involved in gene silencing. These modifications give rise to heritable changes in gene expression without altering the DNA sequence. In a first study, researchers observed differential methylated regions (DMRs) in a specific DNA in postmortem brains from AD patients. Due to this fact we decided to focus on two target genes from AD in order to compare differences in methylation between different experimental situations. In this project, we have developed a pipeline for finding DMR between different experimental conditions based on methylation data generated with the 454 GS FLX system from Roche, and DNA bisulfite-treated samples.