AUTHOR=Widayati Tyas Arum , Schneider Jadesada , Panteleeva Kseniia , Chernysheva Elizabeth , Hrbkova Natalie , Beck Stephan , Voloshin Vitaly , Chervova Olga TITLE=Open access-enabled evaluation of epigenetic age acceleration in colorectal cancer and development of a classifier with diagnostic potential JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics VOLUME=14 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2023.1258648 DOI=10.3389/fgene.2023.1258648 ISSN=1664-8021 ABSTRACT=
Aberrant DNA methylation (DNAm) is known to be associated with the aetiology of cancer, including colorectal cancer (CRC). In the past, the availability of open access data has been the main driver of innovative method development and research training. However, this is increasingly being eroded by the move to controlled access, particularly of medical data, including cancer DNAm data. To rejuvenate this valuable tradition, we leveraged DNAm data from 1,845 samples (535 CRC tumours, 522 normal colon tissues adjacent to tumours, 72 colorectal adenomas, and 716 normal colon tissues from healthy individuals) from 14 open access studies deposited in NCBI GEO and ArrayExpress. We calculated each sample’s epigenetic age (EA) using eleven epigenetic clock models and derived the corresponding epigenetic age acceleration (EAA). For EA, we observed that most first- and second-generation epigenetic clocks reflect the chronological age in normal tissues adjacent to tumours and healthy individuals [e.g., Horvath (