Background: There has been a long-standing need in biomedical research for a method that quantifies the normally mixed composition of leukocytes beyond what is possible by simple histological or flow cytometric assessments. The latter is restricted by the labile nature of protein epitopes, requirements for cell processing, and timely cell...
DNA methylation is a well-recognized epigenetic mechanism that has been the subject of a growing
body of literature typically focused on the identification and study of profiles of DNA methylation and their
association with human diseases and exposures. In recent years, a number of unsupervised clustering algorithms,
both parametric and...
Background: There is increasing epidemiologic evidence that arsenic exposure in utero, even at low levels found throughout much of the world, is associated with adverse reproductive outcomes and may contribute to long-term health effects. Animal models, in vitro studies, and human cancer data suggest that arsenic may induce epigenetic alterations,...
The potential influence of underlying differences in relative leukocyte distributions in studies involving blood-based profiling of DNA methylation is well recognized and has prompted development of a set of statistical methods for inferring changes in the distribution of white blood cells using DNA methylation signatures. However, the extent to which...
The promise of epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) and cancer specific somatic changes in improving our understanding of cancer coupled with the decreasing cost and increasing coverage of DNA methylation microarrays, has brought about a surge in the use of these technologies. Here, we aim to provide both a review of...
MOTIVATION: Recently there has been increasing interest in the effects
of cell mixture on the measurement of DNA methylation, specifically
the extent to which small perturbations in cell mixture proportions can
register as changes in DNA methylation. A recently published set of
statistical methods exploits this association to infer changes...
BACKGROUND: The impact of cell-composition effects in analysis of DNA methylation data is now widely appreciated. With the availability of a reference data set consisting of DNA methylation measurements on isolated cell types, it is possible to impute cell proportions and adjust for them, but there is increasing interest in...
Exposure to arsenic early in life has been associated with increased risk of several chronic diseases and is believed to alter epigenetic programming in utero. In the present study, we evaluate the epigenome-wide association of arsenic exposure in utero and DNA methylation in placenta (n=37), umbilical artery (n=45) and human...
Background: Prenatal mercury (Hg) exposure is associated with adverse child neurobehavioral outcomes. Because Hg can interfere with placental functioning and cross the placenta to target the fetal brain, prenatal Hg exposure can inhibit fetal growth and development directly and indirectly. Objectives: We examined potential associations between prenatal Hg exposure assessed...
Understanding the precise role of the immune system in cancer has been hindered by the complexity of the immune response and challenges in measuring immune cell types in health and disease in the context of large epidemiologic studies. In this review, we present the rationale to study immunity in cancer...