ArticleGenome biology2013
Longitudinal, genome-scale analysis of DNA methylation in twins from birth to 18 months of age reveals rapid epigenetic change in early life and pair-specific effects of discordance.
Article in Genome biology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 100 papers.
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Who cites it
100 citing papers in PubMed, 196 citations in OpenAlex.
- Determination of Zygosity in Adult Chinese Twins Using the 450K Methylation Array versus Questionnaire Data.PloS one · 2015Trial
- Longitudinal omics data analysis: approaches and applications.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Review
- Perinatal Exposure to Lead or Diethylhexyl Phthalate in Mice: Sex-Specific Effects on Cardiac DNA Methylation and Gene Expression across Time.Environmental health perspectives · 2025Article
- An Update on Neuroaging on Earth and in Spaceflight.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Age-related changes in DNA methylation in a sample of elderly Brazilians.Clinical epigenetics · 2025Article
- Birth weight discordance, gene expression, and DNA methylation: A scoping review of epigenetic twin studies.PloS one · 2025Article
- Development of an epigenetic clock resistant to changes in immune cell composition.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Global analysis of DNA methylation changes during experimented lingual carcinogenesis.Hua xi kou qiang yi xue za zhi = Huaxi kouqiang yixue zazhi = West China journal of stomatology · 2024Article
- Technical strategy for monozygotic twin discrimination by single-nucleotide variants.International journal of legal medicine · 2024Article
- Review
- Getting the chronological age out of DNA: using insights of age-dependent DNA methylation for forensic DNA applications.Genes & genomics · 2023Review
- Concomitant Coronary Artery Disease in Identical Twins: Case Report and Systematic Literature Review.Journal of clinical medicine · 2023Review
- Review
- Epigenetic studies of child neurodevelopment: what can we learn from a developmental science perspective?Epigenomics · 2023Article
- Evidence for ethnicity and location as regulators of the newborn blood metabolome: a monozygous twin study.Frontiers in nutrition · 2023Article
- Local CpG density affects the trajectory and variance of age-associated DNA methylation changes.Genome biology · 2022Article
- A comparison of epithelial cell content of oral samples estimated using cytology and DNA methylation.Epigenetics · 2022Article
- Estimating and accounting for unobserved covariates in high-dimensional correlated data.Journal of the American Statistical Association · 2022Article
- Epigenome-wide change and variation in DNA methylation in childhood: trajectories from birth to late adolescence.Human molecular genetics · 2021Article
- Equivalent DNA methylation variation between monozygotic co-twins and unrelated individuals reveals universal epigenetic inter-individual dissimilarity.Genome biology · 2021Article
40 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe extent to which development- and age-associated epigenetic changes are influenced by genetic, environmental and stochastic factors remains to be discovered. Twins provide an ideal model with which to investigate these influences but previous cross-sectional twin studies provide contradictory evidence of within-pair epigenetic drift over time. Longitudinal twin studies can potentially address this discrepancy.
resultsIn a pilot, genome-scale study of DNA from buccal epithelium, a relatively homogeneous tissue, we show that one-third of the CpGs assayed show dynamic methylation between birth and 18 months. Although all classes of annotated genomic regions assessed show an increase in DNA methylation over time, probes located in intragenic regions, enhancers and low-density CpG promoters are significantly over-represented, while CpG islands and high-CpG density promoters are depleted among the most dynamic probes. Comparison of co-twins demonstrated that within-pair drift in DNA methylation in our cohort is specific to a subset of pairs, who show more differences at 18 months. The rest of the pairs show either minimal change in methylation discordance, or more similar, converging methylation profiles at 18 months. As with age-associated regions, sites that change in their level of within-pair discordance between birth and 18 months are enriched in genes involved in development, but the average magnitude of change is smaller than for longitudinal change.
conclusionsOur findings suggest that DNA methylation in buccal epithelium is influenced by non-shared stochastic and environmental factors that could reflect a degree of epigenetic plasticity within an otherwise constrained developmental program.
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