TY - Generic T1 - Minfi: a flexible and comprehensive Bioconductor package for the analysis of Infinium DNA methylation microarrays. Y1 - 2014 A1 - Aryee, Martin J A1 - Jaffe, Andrew E A1 - Corrada-Bravo, Hector A1 - Ladd-Acosta, Christine A1 - Feinberg, Andrew P A1 - Hansen, Kasper D A1 - Irizarry, Rafael A KW - Aged KW - algorithms KW - Colonic Neoplasms KW - DNA Methylation KW - Genome KW - High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing KW - HUMANS KW - Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis KW - Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide KW - software AB -

MOTIVATION: The recently released Infinium HumanMethylation450 array (the '450k' array) provides a high-throughput assay to quantify DNA methylation (DNAm) at ∼450 000 loci across a range of genomic features. Although less comprehensive than high-throughput sequencing-based techniques, this product is more cost-effective and promises to be the most widely used DNAm high-throughput measurement technology over the next several years.

RESULTS: Here we describe a suite of computational tools that incorporate state-of-the-art statistical techniques for the analysis of DNAm data. The software is structured to easily adapt to future versions of the technology. We include methods for preprocessing, quality assessment and detection of differentially methylated regions from the kilobase to the megabase scale. We show how our software provides a powerful and flexible development platform for future methods. We also illustrate how our methods empower the technology to make discoveries previously thought to be possible only with sequencing-based methods.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/minfi.html.

CONTACT: khansen@jhsph.edu; rafa@jimmy.harvard.edu

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

JA - Bioinformatics VL - 30 CP - 10 M3 - 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu049 ER -