Research Article Gender-Specific DNA Methylome Analysis of a Han Chinese Longevity Population

Copyright © 2014 Liang Sun et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Human longevity is always a biological hotspot and so much effort has been devoted to identifying genes and genetic variations associated with longer lives. Most of the demographic studies have highlighted that females have a longer life span than males. The reasons for this are not entirely clear. In this study, we carried out a pool-based, epigenome-wide investigation of DNAmethylation profiles in male and female nonagenarians/centenarians using the Illumina 450K Methylation Beadchip assays. Although no significant difference was detected for the average methylation levels of examined CpGs (or probes) between male and female samples, a significant number of differentially methylated probes (DMPs) were identified, which appeared to be enriched in certain chromosome regions and certain parts of genes. Further analysis of DMP-containing genes (named DMGs) revealed that almos