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Meta-Analysis
. 2016 Apr 7;98(4):680-96.
doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2016.02.019. Epub 2016 Mar 31.

DNA Methylation in Newborns and Maternal Smoking in Pregnancy: Genome-wide Consortium Meta-analysis

Bonnie R Joubert  1 Janine F Felix  2 Paul Yousefi  3 Kelly M Bakulski  4 Allan C Just  5 Carrie Breton  6 Sarah E Reese  1 Christina A Markunas  7 Rebecca C Richmond  8 Cheng-Jian Xu  9 Leanne K Küpers  10 Sam S Oh  11 Cathrine Hoyo  12 Olena Gruzieva  13 Cilla Söderhäll  14 Lucas A Salas  15 Nour Baïz  16 Hongmei Zhang  17 Johanna Lepeule  18 Carlos Ruiz  15 Symen Ligthart  19 Tianyuan Wang  1 Jack A Taylor  1 Liesbeth Duijts  20 Gemma C Sharp  8 Soesma A Jankipersadsing  21 Roy M Nilsen  22 Ahmad Vaez  23 M Daniele Fallin  4 Donglei Hu  11 Augusto A Litonjua  24 Bernard F Fuemmeler  25 Karen Huen  3 Juha Kere  14 Inger Kull  13 Monica Cheng Munthe-Kaas  26 Ulrike Gehring  27 Mariona Bustamante  28 Marie José Saurel-Coubizolles  29 Bilal M Quraishi  17 Jie Ren  6 Jörg Tost  30 Juan R Gonzalez  15 Marjolein J Peters  31 Siri E Håberg  32 Zongli Xu  1 Joyce B van Meurs  31 Tom R Gaunt  8 Marjan Kerkhof  33 Eva Corpeleijn  10 Andrew P Feinberg  34 Celeste Eng  11 Andrea A Baccarelli  35 Sara E Benjamin Neelon  4 Asa Bradman  3 Simon Kebede Merid  13 Anna Bergström  13 Zdenko Herceg  36 Hector Hernandez-Vargas  36 Bert Brunekreef  37 Mariona Pinart  38 Barbara Heude  39 Susan Ewart  40 Jin Yao  6 Nathanaël Lemonnier  41 Oscar H Franco  19 Michael C Wu  42 Albert Hofman  43 Wendy McArdle  44 Pieter Van der Vlies  45 Fahimeh Falahi  10 Matthew W Gillman  46 Lisa F Barcellos  3 Ashish Kumar  47 Magnus Wickman  48 Stefano Guerra  49 Marie-Aline Charles  39 John Holloway  50 Charles Auffray  41 Henning W Tiemeier  51 George Davey Smith  8 Dirkje Postma  52 Marie-France Hivert  46 Brenda Eskenazi  3 Martine Vrijheid  15 Hasan Arshad  53 Josep M Antó  38 Abbas Dehghan  19 Wilfried Karmaus  17 Isabella Annesi-Maesano  16 Jordi Sunyer  38 Akram Ghantous  36 Göran Pershagen  13 Nina Holland  3 Susan K Murphy  54 Dawn L DeMeo  24 Esteban G Burchard  55 Christine Ladd-Acosta  4 Harold Snieder  10 Wenche Nystad  32 Gerard H Koppelman  56 Caroline L Relton  8 Vincent W V Jaddoe  2 Allen Wilcox  1 Erik Melén  48 Stephanie J London  57
Affiliations
Meta-Analysis

DNA Methylation in Newborns and Maternal Smoking in Pregnancy: Genome-wide Consortium Meta-analysis

Bonnie R Joubert et al. Am J Hum Genet. .

Abstract

Epigenetic modifications, including DNA methylation, represent a potential mechanism for environmental impacts on human disease. Maternal smoking in pregnancy remains an important public health problem that impacts child health in a myriad of ways and has potential lifelong consequences. The mechanisms are largely unknown, but epigenetics most likely plays a role. We formed the Pregnancy And Childhood Epigenetics (PACE) consortium and meta-analyzed, across 13 cohorts (n = 6,685), the association between maternal smoking in pregnancy and newborn blood DNA methylation at over 450,000 CpG sites (CpGs) by using the Illumina 450K BeadChip. Over 6,000 CpGs were differentially methylated in relation to maternal smoking at genome-wide statistical significance (false discovery rate, 5%), including 2,965 CpGs corresponding to 2,017 genes not previously related to smoking and methylation in either newborns or adults. Several genes are relevant to diseases that can be caused by maternal smoking (e.g., orofacial clefts and asthma) or adult smoking (e.g., certain cancers). A number of differentially methylated CpGs were associated with gene expression. We observed enrichment in pathways and processes critical to development. In older children (5 cohorts, n = 3,187), 100% of CpGs gave at least nominal levels of significance, far more than expected by chance (p value < 2.2 × 10(-16)). Results were robust to different normalization methods used across studies and cell type adjustment. In this large scale meta-analysis of methylation data, we identified numerous loci involved in response to maternal smoking in pregnancy with persistence into later childhood and provide insights into mechanisms underlying effects of this important exposure.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Meta-analysis of the Association between Sustained Maternal Smoking during Pregnancy and DNA Methylation in Newborn Cord Blood A total of 6,073 CpGs were considered statistically significant when using FDR correction (solid horizontal line); 568 were Bonferroni significant (dashed horizontal line).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Volcano Plot Indicating the Direction of Effects for the Meta-analysis of the Association between Sustained Maternal Smoking during Pregnancy and DNA Methylation in Newborn Cord Blood

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