Methylation genome wide profiling in lowly and highly efficient adipose somatic cell nuclear transfer in pigs

Abstract: Swine is a common model organism for biomedical research. Epigenetic reprogramming in SCNT embryos does not fully recapitulate the natural DNA demethylation events at fertilisation. This study aimed to conduct a genome-wide methylation profiling to detect differentially methylated regions (DMRs) responsible for epigenetic differences in stem cells that displayed high and low efficiency of SCNT and to elucidate the low efficiency of cloning rate in pigs. Adipose tissue mesenchymal stem cells (AMSC)s lines were isolated from adipose tissue of adult male pigs (n=20; high-efficiency cells=10; low efficiency cells= 10). Reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) was performed on an Illumina HiSeq1500. Paired-end reads were filtered to remove the adapter contamination, and low-quality reads using TrimGalore!. Filtered reads were mapped to the reference genome using Bismark. MethylKit was used to identify differentially methylated regions (DMRs) (bases and tiles), showing statistically significant differential methylation between two groups: high and low-efficiency AMSCs. Hierarchical cluster analysis according to methylation patterns clearly defined groups with low and high cloning efficiency. We report 3704 bases with statistically significant differences in methylation and 10062 tiles with statistically significant differences in methylation. Most differentially methylated sites are intergenic 62%, 31% are intronic, 4% are located in exons and 4% in promoters. 37% of differentially methylated sites are located in known CpG islands (CGIs) and 4% in CpG island shores (CGSs).