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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Epigenet. Epigenom.
Sec. Epigenomic Tools
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/freae.2025.1535838
High-throughput, pan-leukocyte biomarkers for the detection of inflammation in human breastmilk and stool
Provisionally accepted- 1 Department of Biochemistry, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
- 2 Department of Anatomy, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
- 3 Department of Pathology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
- 4 Department of Anatomy, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Otago, Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
DNA methylation can be used to track cellular identity. We have previously developed a high-throughput, cost-effective DNA methylation pipeline containing two loci, HOXA3 and MAP4K1, that can quantify leukocyte proportion amongst a range of background tissues.Here, we apply this pipeline to two clinically relevant tissue samples: breastmilk and stool.We report that our leukocyte methylation assay can quantify the proportion of leukocytes in breast milk, and find leukocyte levels fluctuate dramatically in concert with infection severity. We benchmarked our leukocyte methylation pipeline in stool samples against the commonly used faecal calprotectin assay. Our results show a high concordance between the two methods indicating the viability of our DNA methylation biomarkers in the context of intestinal inflammation.The data presented here emphasise the clinical applicability of our high-throughput DNA methylation assay in the context of mastitis and intestinal inflammation.
Keywords: DNA Methylation, biomarker, Leukocytes, Inflammation, Mastitis, inflammatory bowel disease 2
Received: 27 Nov 2024; Accepted: 05 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Dunnet, Morrison, Bond and Hore. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Donna Maree Bond, Department of Anatomy, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9016, Otago, New Zealand
Timothy Alexander Hore, Department of Anatomy, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9016, Otago, New Zealand
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