Back

Improved deconvolution of circulating tumor DNA from ultra-low-pass whole-genome methylation sequencing using CelFiE-ISH

Katsman, E.; Isaac, S.; Darwish, A.; Maoz, M.; Inbar, M.; Marouani, M.; Unterman, I.; Gugenheim, A.; Salaymeh, N.; Abu Khdeir, S.; Uziely, B.; Peretz, T.; Kaduri, L.; Hubert, A.; Cohen, J. E.; Salah, A.; Temper, M.; Sela, T.; Grinshpun, A.; Zick, A.; Berman, B. P.; Eden, A.

2026-04-18 genomics
10.64898/2026.04.15.718632 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Liquid biopsy using ultra-low-pass whole-genome sequencing (ULP-WGS, [~]0.25x coverage) is a promising tool to detect circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) for cancer management, and the use of the native Oxford Nanopore (ONT) sequencing platform adds DNA methylation to the set of detectable features. Here, we test the performance of methylation-based cell-type deconvolution in ULP-WGS samples from diverse epithelial malignancies and investigate several new computational strategies using our CelFiE-ISH deconvolution framework. We find that incorporating larger numbers of markers restricted to the epithelial cell lineage can reduce the cancer fraction limit of detection down to 1.7-3.1%, matching or exceeding the 3% floor of established copy-number alteration (CNA) benchmarks. Our study provides a useful strategy for analysis of ULP-WGS ONT data and indicates that marker selection remains a key challenge for analyzing methylation-based cancer datasets.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Genome Medicine
154 papers in training set
Top 0.5%
10.1%
2
Nature Communications
4913 papers in training set
Top 25%
7.2%
3
Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal
216 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
6.8%
4
Scientific Reports
3102 papers in training set
Top 18%
6.4%
5
Bioinformatics
1061 papers in training set
Top 4%
4.8%
6
Cell Reports Methods
141 papers in training set
Top 0.5%
4.8%
7
Nature Biotechnology
147 papers in training set
Top 3%
3.6%
8
Genome Research
409 papers in training set
Top 1.0%
3.6%
9
Communications Biology
886 papers in training set
Top 2%
3.6%
50% of probability mass above
10
Genome Biology
555 papers in training set
Top 3%
2.6%
11
Nucleic Acids Research
1128 papers in training set
Top 8%
2.4%
12
Briefings in Bioinformatics
326 papers in training set
Top 3%
2.4%
13
Frontiers in Genetics
197 papers in training set
Top 3%
2.4%
14
GigaScience
172 papers in training set
Top 1%
1.8%
15
BMC Genomics
328 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.8%
16
PLOS ONE
4510 papers in training set
Top 54%
1.7%
17
PLOS Computational Biology
1633 papers in training set
Top 16%
1.7%
18
Nature Machine Intelligence
61 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.7%
19
Cell Genomics
162 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.7%
20
iScience
1063 papers in training set
Top 15%
1.7%
21
NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics
214 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.7%
22
npj Systems Biology and Applications
99 papers in training set
Top 1%
1.5%
23
Nature Methods
336 papers in training set
Top 5%
1.3%
24
BMC Bioinformatics
383 papers in training set
Top 5%
1.3%
25
eLife
5422 papers in training set
Top 52%
0.9%
26
Cell Systems
167 papers in training set
Top 11%
0.8%
27
Human Genetics and Genomics Advances
70 papers in training set
Top 0.8%
0.7%
28
Clinical Cancer Research
58 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.7%
29
Clinical Chemistry
22 papers in training set
Top 0.9%
0.7%
30
Bioinformatics Advances
184 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.7%