DMMC Course: EPIGENETICS: FROM MECHANISMS TO MEDICINES

1530-1610 Monday 25 June 2007. O’Reilly Hall, University College Dublin.

Discovery of DNA Hypermethylation using a DHPLC screening strategy
Dr Antoinette Perry (Trinity College Dublin)

Promoter hypermethylation is recognized as a hallmark of human cancer. An explosion of new technologies have been developed over the past two decades to uncover novel targets of methylation and decipher complex epigenetic patterns. However, many of these are either labour intensive or provide limited data, confined to oligonucleotide hybridization sequences or enzyme cleavage sites and cannot be easily applied to screening large sets of sequences or samples. A novel methylation screening tool combines the chemistry of denaturing high performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) with the introduction of methylation dependent multi-mutations into DNA sequences following bisulfite conversion. DHPLC has an application as a fast, sensitive, quantitative and cost effective method for screening DNA samples for hypermethylation.