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. 2011 Mar 31:12:47.
doi: 10.1186/1471-2350-12-47.

Parental ages and levels of DNA methylation in the newborn are correlated

Ronald M Adkins  1 , Fridtjof Thomas, Frances A Tylavsky, Julia Krushkal
Affiliations

Parental ages and levels of DNA methylation in the newborn are correlated

Ronald M Adkins et al. BMC Med Genet. .

Abstract

Background: Changes in DNA methylation patterns with age frequently have been observed and implicated in the normal aging process and its associated increasing risk of disease, particularly cancer. Additionally, the offspring of older parents are at significantly increased risk of cancer, diabetes, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Only a proportion of these increased risks among the children of older parents can be attributed to nondisjunction and chromosomal rearrangements.

Results: Using a genome-wide survey of 27,578 CpG dinucleotides in a cohort of 168 newborns, we examined the relationship between DNA methylation in newborns and a variety of parental and newborn traits. We found that methylation levels of 144 CpGs belonging to 142 genes were significantly correlated with maternal age. A weaker correlation was observed with paternal age. Among these genes, processes related to cancer were over-represented, as were functions related to neurological regulation, glucose/carbohydrate metabolism, nucleocytoplasmic transport, and transcriptional regulation. CpGs exhibiting gender differences in methylation were overwhelmingly located on the X chromosome, although a small subset of autosomal CpGs were found in genes previously shown to exhibit gender-specific differences in methylation levels.

Conclusions: These results indicate that there are differences in CpG methylation levels at birth that are related to parental age and that could influence disease risk in childhood and throughout life.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distribution of the Spearman rank correlation rho statistics between maternal age and newborn CpG methylation. Using the annotation of the Humanmethylation27 array provided by Illumina Inc., the distribution of rho statistics was plotted for CpG dinucleotides outside of CpG islands (left) and inside islands (right).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Scatterplot comparison of maternal and paternal ages among 89 newborns for which the age of both parents was known.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Scatterplot of newborns along the first and second principal components calculated from genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data. Maternally-declared Caucasian newborns are represented by circles and African-American newborns by X's.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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