The use of methylation-sensitive multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification for quantification of imprinted methylation

Abstract

Imprinting disorders are a group of congenital diseases that can result from multiple mechanisms affecting imprinted gene dosage including cytogenetic aberration and epigenetic anomalies. Quantification of CpG methylation and correct copy-number calling is required for molecular diagnosis. Methylation-sensitive multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MS-MLPA) is a multiplex method that accurately measures both parameters in a single assay. This technique relies upon the ligation of MLPA probe oligonucleotides and digestion of the genomic DNA–probe hybrid complexes with the Hha1 methylation-sensitive restriction endonuclease prior to fluorescent PCR amplification with a single primer pair. Since each targeted probe contains stuffer sequence of varying length, each interrogated position is visualized as an amplicon of different size upon capillary electrophoresis.