Back

Systematic errors in enzymatic conversion limit cell-free DNA methylation specificity

Loyfer, N.; Magenheim, J.; Darwish, A.; Isaac, S.; Ganbat, J.; Babikir, H.; Jhutty, A.; Wan, J.; Bayes-Genis, A.; Revuelta-Lopez, E.; Eden, A.; Solanki, R.; Dor, Y.; Kaplan, T.

2026-03-26 genomics
10.64898/2026.03.24.713040 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Enzymatic methylation sequencing (EM-seq) converts unmethylated cytosines to uracils while preserving DNA integrity, making it attractive for liquid biopsies. Here we report a reproducible fragment-level over-conversion error in EM-seq, which is not observed in bisulfite-based conversion or in Oxford Nanopore sequencing. While bisulfite and nanopore errors occur at sporadic CpGs, EM-seq generates molecules that appear fully unmethylated, introducing a false-positive background signal that severely limits deconvolution specificity in cfDNA analysis.

Matching journals

The top 3 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.