META2: Intercellular DNA Methylation Pairwise Annotation and Integrative Analysis

Genome-wide deciphering intercellular differential DNA methylation as well as its roles in transcriptional regulation remains elusive in cancer epigenetics. Here we developed a toolkit META2 for DNA methylation annotation and analysis, which aims to perform integrative analysis on differentially methylated loci and regions through deep mining and statistical comparison methods. META2 contains multiple versatile functions for investigating and annotating DNA methylation profiles. Benchmarked with T-47D cell, we interrogated the association within differentially methylated CpG (DMC) and region (DMR) candidate count and region length and identified major transition zones as clues for inferring statistically significant DMRs; together we validated those DMRs with the functional annotation. Thus META2 can provide a comprehensive analysis approach for epigenetic research and clinical study.