DNA Methylation Episignature Testing Improves Molecular Diagnosis of Mendelian Chromatinopathies

Purpose: Chromatinopathies include more than 50 disorders caused by disease-causing variants of various components of chromatin structure and function. Many of these disorders exhibit unique genome-wide DNA methylation profiles, known as episignatures. In this study, the methylation profile of a large cohort of individuals with chromatinopathies was analyzed for episignature detection.

Methods: DNA methylation data was generated on extracted blood samples from 129 affected individuals with the Illumina Infinium EPIC arrays and analyzed using an established bioinformatic pipeline.

Results: The DNA methylation profiles matched and confirmed the sequence findings in both the discovery and validation cohorts. Twenty-five affected individuals carrying a variant of uncertain significance, did not show a methylation profile matching any of the known episignatures. Three additional variant of uncertain significance cases with an identified KDM6A variant were re-classified as likely pathogenic (n = 2) or re-assigned as Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome (n = 1). Thirty of the 33 Next Generation Sequencing negative cases did not match a defined episignature while three matched Kabuki syndrome, Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome and BAFopathy respectively.

Conclusion: With the expanding clinical utility of the EpiSign assay, DNA methylation analysis should be considered part of the testing cascade for individuals presenting with clinical features of Mendelian chromatinopathy disorders.