Parallel shift of DNA methylation and gene expression toward the mean in mouse spleen with aging

Age-associated DNA-methylation drift (AMD) manifests itself in two ways in mammals: global decrease (hypomethylation) and local increase of DNA methylation (hypermethylation). To comprehend the principle behind this bidirectional AMD, we studied methylation states of spatially clustered CpG dinucleotides in mouse splenic DNA using reduced-representation-bisulfite-sequencing (RRBS). The mean methylation levels of whole CpGs declined with age. Promoter-resident CpGs, generally weakly methylated (<5%) in young mice, became hypermethylated in old mice, whereas CpGs in gene-body and intergenic regions, initially moderately (~33%) and extensively (>80%) methylated, respectively, were hypomethylated in the old. Chromosome-wise analysis of methylation revealed that inter-individual heterogeneities increase with age. The density of nearby CpGs was used to classify individual CpGs, which found hypermethylation in CpG-rich regions and hypomethylation in CpG-poor regions. When genomic regions were grouped by methylation level, high-methylation regions tended to become hypomethylated whereas low-methylation regions tended to become hypermethylated, regardless of genomic structure/function. Data analysis revealed that while methylation level and CpG density were interdependent, methylation level was a better predictor of the AMD pattern representing a shift toward the mean. Further analysis of gene-expression data showed a decrease in the expression of highly-expressed genes and an increase in the expression of lowly-expressed genes with age. This shift towards the mean in gene-expression changes was correlated with that of methylation changes, indicating a potential link between the two age-associated changes. Our findings suggest that age-associated hyper- and hypomethylation events are stochastic and attributed to malfunctioning intrinsic mechanisms for methylation maintenance in low- and high-methylation regions, respectively.