Modeling complex patterns of differential DNA methylation that associate with gene expression changes

Numerous genomic studies are underway to determine which genes are abnormally regulated by DNA methylation in disease. However, we have a poor understanding of how disease-specific methylation changes affect expression. We thus developed an integrative analysis tool, Methylation-based Gene Expression Classification (ME-Class), to explain specific variation in methylation that associates with expression change. This model captures the complexity of methylation changes around a gene promoter. Using 17 whole-genome bisulfite sequencing and RNA-seq datasets from different tissues from the Roadmap Epigenomics Project, ME-Class significantly outperforms standard methods using methylation to predict differential gene expression change. To demonstrate its utility, we used ME-Class to analyze 32 datasets from different hematopoietic cell types from the Blueprint Epigenome project. Expression-associated methylation changes were predominantly found when comparing cells from distantly related lineages, implying that changes in the cell's transcriptional program precede associated methylation changes. Training ME-Class on normaltumor pairs from The Cancer Genome Atlas indicated that cancer-specific expression-associated methylation changes differ from tissue-specific changes. We further show that ME-Class can detect functionally relevant cancer-specific, expression-associated methylation changes that are reversed upon the removal of methylation. ME-Class is thus a powerful tool to identify genes that are dysregulated by DNA methylation in disease.