Montaño, Carolina MIrizarry, Rafael AKaufmann, Walter ETalbot, KonradGur, Raquel EFeinberg, Andrew PTaub, Margaret A2014-07-072013Montaño, Carolina M, Rafael A Irizarry, Walter E Kaufmann, Konrad Talbot, Raquel E Gur, Andrew P Feinberg, and Margaret A Taub. 2013. “Measuring cell-type specific differential methylation in human brain tissue.” Genome Biology 14 (8): R94. doi:10.1186/gb-2013-14-8-r94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/gb-2013-14-8-r94.1465-6906http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12406694The behavior of epigenetic mechanisms in the brain is obscured by tissue heterogeneity and disease-related histological changes. Not accounting for these confounders leads to biased results. We develop a statistical methodology that estimates and adjusts for celltype composition by decomposing neuronal and non-neuronal differential signal. This method provides a conceptual framework for deconvolving heterogeneous epigenetic data from postmortem brain studies. We apply it to find cell-specific differentially methylated regions between prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. We demonstrate the utility of the method on both Infinium 450k and CHARM data.en-USDNA methylationepigeneticsdifferentially methylated regionbrain regioncell-type heterogeneitydeconvolutionNeuNneurongliapostmortem brainfluorescence activated cell sortingJournal Article2014-07-0710.1186/gb-2013-14-8-r94