Chunk #20 — Results — Associations of DNA Methylation with Physical Aggression in the Loci of Transcriptional Regulators of Differentially Expressed Cytokines
As we did for the cytokine genes, we examined whether the differentially methylated regions associated with aggression contained previously published transcription factor (TF) binding sites, DNase hypersensitive clusters and enrichment for histone modifications H3K4Me1, H3K4Me3 and H3K27Ac using the ENCODE database (http://genome.ucsc.edu/ENCODE/). We found that most of the differentially methylated regions associated with CPA identified in NFkB1 and STAT6 loci in both cell types were located within DNase hypersensitive clusters, transcription factors binding sites and H3K4Me1, H3K4Me3 and H3K27Ac peaks, supporting a regulatory role for these regions (Table 2 and Figures S4 and S6). In contrast, only a few differentially methylated regions between CPA and controls in NFAT5 locus were located within regulatory elements. None of the regions were located within CpG islands.
