Back

Heatrich-BS enables efficient CpG enrichment and highly scalable cell-free DNA methylation profiling

Cheruba, E.; Viswanathan, R.; Wong, P. M.; Womersley, H. J.; Lau, Y.; Gan, A.; Poon, P. S. Y.; Ng, S. B.; Chong, D. Q.; Tan, I. B.; Cheow, L. F.

2021-04-06 genomics
10.1101/2021.04.05.437976 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Genome wide analysis of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation profile has been shown to be a promising approach for sensitive and specific multi-cancer detection. However, scaling these assays for clinical translation is impractical due to the high cost of whole genome bisulfite sequencing. We showed that the small fraction of GC-rich genome is highly enriched in CpG sites and disproportionately harbored the majority of cancer-specific methylation signature. Here, we report on the simple but effective Heat enrichment of CpG-rich regions for Bisulfite Sequencing (Heatrich-BS) platform that enables focused methylation profiling in these highly informative regions. Our novel method and bioinformatics algorithm enable high accuracy and sensitivity in tumor burden estimation and quantitative monitoring of colorectal patient response to treatment, at much reduced sequencing requirement. Heatrich-BS holds great potential for highly scalable screening and regular monitoring of cancer using liquid biopsy.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.