Analysis of retrotransposon subfamily DNA methylation reveals novel early epigenetic changes in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Abstract

Retrotransposons such as LINE-1 and Alu comprise >25% of the human genome. While global hypomethylation of these elements has been widely reported in solid tumours, their epigenetic dysregulation is yet to be characterised in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and there has been scant consideration of their evolutionary history that mediates sensitivity to hypomethylation. Here, we developed an approach for locus- and evolutionary subfamily-specific analysis of retrotransposons using the Illumina Infinium Human Methylation 450K microarray platform, which we applied to publicly-available datasets from CLL and other haematological malignancies. We identified 9,797 microarray probes mapping to..