DNA Methylation Changes In Aging Human CD34+ Cells Coincide With Hotspots Of Disordered Methylation In AML At Imprinted and Allelically Methylated Regions

• Published in: Blood 2013-11, Vol.122 (21), p.1193-1193
• Main Authors: Triche, Tim, Capone, Stephen, Merchant, Akil, Chaudhary, Preet, Ramsingh, Giridharan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0006-4971; 1528-0020
• DOI: 10.1182/blood.V122.21.1193.1193

Aging of the hematopoietic system in humans is associated with increased incidence of myeloid malignancies. Epigenetic machinery such as DNA methylation is known to change with age, and is disproportionately impacted by recurrent genetic mutations in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). We hypothesized that epigenetic changes in CD34+ hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) may precede recurrent genetic changes in AML, and might be detected in normal aging HSPCs with increasing frequency. We also hypothesized that areas with increased variability in methylation may be hot-spots for the emergence of epigenetically distinct HSPC clones. In order to characterize these changes, we performed methylome-wide profiles of human HSPCs from different age groups (20-25 years (10), 40-45 years (10) and >60 years (9)).Adult HSPCs were obtained from Leukocyte Reduction System cones from healthy platelet donors. CD34+ cells were then isolated by Fluorescence Assisted Cell Sorting. 200 ng of DNA extracted from the CD34+ cells was processed using the Infinium Methylation 450k Beadchip (Illumina). Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified using the bump hunting procedure of Jaffe (2011) to pool information across CpG loci into regions of consistent change and to quantify statistical significance. 893 differentially methylated regions (DMRs) varied linearly with age in HSPCs; a set of 31 such regions yielded an accurate predictor of age in lineage-sorted cells (N=48, Reinius et al., 2012) and whole blood (N=656, Hannum et al., 2011), with a root-mean-squared error of 5.3 years. While age-related lymphopenia has previously been reported, DNA methylation marks for lineage commitment (Houseman et al., 2012) were nearly uniform within our subjects' CD34+ cells, and exhibited no relationship with age. However, regional summaries of methylation provided more accurate age predictions than specific CpG loci. We reasoned that differential variability at individual loci might be the cause. We thus investigated regions where methylation variability increased with age. Known imprinted clusters and allelically methylated regions (AMRs) identified by Fang (2012, PNAS) were disproportionately represented among these; 27% of known imprinting regions and 33.3% of allelically methylated regions in the genome coincided with at least one such region, while comprising only 0.3% of the genome and 0.7% of loci assayed. Among these, the H19 imprinting control region has been shown to