Epigenomics: Sequencing the Methylome

DNA methylation patterns are increasingly surveyed through methods that utilize massively parallel sequencing. Sequence-based assays developed to detect DNA methylation can be broadly divided into those that depend on affinity enrichment, chemical conversion, or enzymatic restriction. The DNA fragments resulting from these methods are uniformly subjected to library construction and massively parallel sequencing. The sequence reads are subsequently aligned to a reference genome and subjected to specialized analytical tools to extract the underlying methylation signature. This chapter will outline these emerging techniques.