Paulina Pruszkowska-Przybylska, Mikkel Eriksen Dupont, Stine Bøttcher Jacobsen, Morten Smerup, Jacob Tfelt-Hansen, Niels Morling, Jeppe Dyrberg Andersen
Abstract
The continued development in methylome analysis has enabled a more precise assessment of DNA methylation, but treatment of target tissue prior to analysis may affect DNA analysis. Prediction of age based on methylation levels in the genome has gained much interest in disease predisposition, but also in chronological donor age estimation in crime case sample
Introduction
The correct storage of a sample is pivotal in forensic [1] and medical sciences [2, 3]. Different storage conditions for tissues may reflect different purposes for tissue analyses, but usually a storage condition is selected to avoid tissue degradation [4]. A commonly used method for sample storage is freezing, which requires large freezing capacities if the sample archive is large.
Materials and Methods
The study was approved by the Committees of Health Research Ethics in the Capital Region of Denmark (H-20039524). The study is registered in the University of Copenhagen’s record of research projects, including personal data (514-0528/20-3000), and it complies with the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679).
Result
This study compared epigenetic age (DNAmAge) in paired fresh, frozen, and FFPE heart tissues using nine different epigenetic clocks (Table 1) and compared it to that of whole blood samples and chronological age from the same individuals.
Discussion
In this study, we evaluated DNAmAge in paired fresh, frozen, and FFPE heart tissues using nine different epigenetic clocks. We show for the first time how the DNAmAge of different epigenetic clock are affected by freezing and FFPE storage methods by comparing results to untreated fresh material.
Conclusion
We used nine different epigenetic clocks and found that FFPE affected DNAmAge more than freezing of the samples, as the difference between DNAmAge of FFPE and fresh tissue was larger compared to DNAmAge of fresh and frozen tissues.
Citation: Pruszkowska-Przybylska P, Dupont ME, Jacobsen SB, Smerup M, Tfelt-Hansen J, Morling N, et al. (2024) Evaluation of DNAmAge in paired fresh, frozen, and formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded heart tissues. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0299557. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299557
Editor: Alessandro Weisz, Universita degli Studi di Salerno, ITALY
Received: July 27, 2023; Accepted: February 12, 2024; Published: May 8, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Pruszkowska-Przybylska et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and Supporting Information files.
Funding: PP-P was supported by the National Science Centre grant (2021/05/X/NZ1/01049). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0299557
