Oncotarget

Research Papers:

A methodological study of genome-wide DNA methylation analyses using matched archival formalin-fixed paraffin embedded and fresh frozen breast tumors

Allyson C. Espinal, Dan Wang, Li Yan, Song Liu, Li Tang, Qiang Hu, Carl D. Morrison, Christine B. Ambrosone, Michael J. Higgins and Lara E. Sucheston- Campbell _

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Oncotarget. 2017; 8:14821-14829. https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.14739

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Abstract

Allyson C. Espinal1,*, Dan Wang2,*, Li Yan2, Song Liu2, Li Tang3, Qiang Hu2, Carl D. Morrison4, Christine B. Ambrosone4, Michael J. Higgins1,#, Lara E. Sucheston-Campbell5,6,#

1Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo NY, USA

2Department of Biostatistics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, USA

3Department of Cancer Prevention and Control, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, USA

4Department of Pathology, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, USA

5College of Pharmacy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

6Department of Veterinary Biosciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

*These authors contributed jointly as first authors

#These authors contributed jointly as senior authors

Correspondence to:

Lara E. Sucheston-Campbell, email: [email protected]

Michael J. Higgins, email: [email protected]

Keywords: DNA methylation/epigenetics, breast cancer, estrogen receptor negative

Received: May 27, 2016     Accepted: January 10, 2017     Published: January 19, 2017

ABSTRACT

Background: DNA from archival formalin-fixed and paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue is an invaluable resource for genome-wide methylation studies although concerns about poor quality may limit its use. In this study, we compared DNA methylation profiles of breast tumors using DNA from fresh-frozen (FF) tissues and three types of matched FFPE samples.

Results: For 9/10 patients, correlation and unsupervised clustering analysis revealed that the FF and FFPE samples were consistently correlated with each other and clustered into distinct subgroups. Greater than 84% of the top 100 loci previously shown to differentiate ER+ and ER– tumors in FF tissues were also FFPE DML. Weighted Correlation Gene Network Analyses (WCGNA) grouped the DML loci into 16 modules in FF tissue, with ~85% of the module membership preserved across tissue types.

Materials and Methods: Restored FFPE and matched FF samples were profiled using the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450K platform. Methylation levels (β-values) across all loci and the top 100 loci previously shown to differentiate tumors by estrogen receptor status (ER+ or ER−) in a larger FF study, were compared between matched FF and FFPE samples using Pearson's correlation, hierarchical clustering and WCGNA. Positive predictive values and sensitivity levels for detecting differentially methylated loci (DML) in FF samples were calculated in an independent FFPE cohort.

Conclusions: FFPE breast tumors samples show lower overall detection of DMLs versus FF, however FFPE and FF DMLs compare favorably. These results support the emerging consensus that the 450K platform can be employed to investigate epigenetics in large sets of archival FFPE tissues.


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