The length of CpG islands is associated with the distribution of Alu and L1 retroelements.
Alu and L1 retroelements have been suggested to initiate the spread of CpG methylation. In this study, the spread of CpG methylation was estimated based on the distance between the CpG islands and the nearest retroelements. All human genes (23,116) were examined and the correlations between the length of the CpG islands and the distance and density of the confronting retroelements were examined using nonoverlapping 5-kb windows. There was a linear relationship between the length of the CpG islands and the density of the Alu elements and an inverse relationship between the CpG islands and the L1 elements located more distantly, suggesting a suppressive effect of the Alu's on the spread of L1 methylation. Methylation analysis of the transitional CpG sites between the CpG islands and the nearest retroelements upstream of 16 genes was then carried out using DNA preparations from 11 different human tissues. Methylation-variable transitional CpGs were observed for the selected genes and the different tissues.
Department of Internal Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, 505 Banpo-dong, Socho-gu, Seoul 137-701, Korea.
Moo-Il
MI
Kang
Mun-Gan
MG
Rhyu
Young-Ho
YH
Kim
Yu-Chae
YC
Jung
Seung-Jin
SJ
Hong
Chul-Soo
CS
Cho
Hye-Soo
HS
Kim
D020087:Alu Elements / Q000235:genetics*; D002478:Cells, Cultured; D018899:CpG Islands / Q000235:genetics*; D019175:DNA Methylation; D006801:Humans; D020084:Long Interspersed Nucleotide Elements / Q000235:genetics*; D011401:Promoter Regions, Genetic; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D013223:Statistics as Topic