We generated DNA methylation (DNAm) data from postmortem dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) brain tissue from 526 individuals using the Illumina HumanMethylation450 (“450k”) microarray, extending earlier DNAm maps of human frontal cortex in normal subjects by twenty-fold increased genomic coverage (>485,000 versus 27,000 probes) in a much larger sample size (335 versus 108 normal subjects)2 and creating a more comprehensive landscape of epigenetic development in the human brain than previously available. While previous efforts to comprehensively measure DNA methylation across the epigenome using whole genome bisulfite sequencing have identified many important features of brain development16, we complement this work using a much larger sample at more continuous ages, albeit at lower genome-wide coverage, to obtain population-level spatial dynamics of DNA methylation across brain development.
