H(O)TA: Estimation of DNA methylation and hydroxylation levels and efficiencies from time course data

Abstract

Motivation: Methylation and hydroxylation of cytosines to form 5-methylcytosine (5mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) belong to the most important epigenetic modifications and their vital role in the regulation of gene expression has been widely recognized. Recent experimental techniques allow to infer methylation and hydroxylation levels at CpG dinucleotides but require a sophisticated statistical analysis to achieve accurate estimates. Results: We present H(O)TA, a software tool based on a stochastic modeling approach, which simultaneously analyzes time course data from hairpin bisulfite sequencing and hairpin oxidative bisulfite sequencing.