Over the years we and others have identified several epigenetic signatures driven by underlying genetic variation. Consider the demographics of your study populations and of comparison groups, make sure things are balanced, and investigate these epi(genetic) hits when they arise!

An inconvenient truth of working with heterogeneous tissues is that sampling variation can influence your study. We demonstrate this by identifying cell composition variation across several public placental DNAme datasets. Something to consider when comparing studies!

We begin by emphasizing that the placenta derives from the conceptus, but its development precedes and is largely independent of fetal development. This is important for ‘omics studies as genetic variation in the placenta (CPM, mutations) can influence both fetal and maternal health.

We’re excited to share a new review article from the Robinson lab: lessons learned from genomic and epigenomic studies of the placenta. Key highlights below! doi.org/10.1016/j.pl...

To test this theory we took gene-level XCI expression calls from placenta (Phung et al. 2022) and tested whether DNAme in our placentas corresponded with the XCI status of associated genes. It did (R~0.3)...but the relationship was weaker than is seen in other tissues!

First, we find that the placenta (purple) is an outlier compared to other tissues by global X-linked DNAme profiles - in both sexes. This is already known on the autosomes but is relatively novel information for the X.