Topological Characterization of Human and Mouse m⁵C Epitranscriptome Revealed by Bisulfite Sequencing

Figure 5

RNA m⁵C modification exhibits a clustering effect. (a) Bar graph shows the proportion of clustered m⁵C sites within 10 nt flanked regions. To evaluate the statistical significance, we generated 1000 permutated results as a comparison with the bars indicating a 99% confidence interval. Using these criteria, m⁵C methylation showed a strong clustering effect consistently on different RNA families and on different regions of mRNA in human and mouse. Around 50% of the m⁵C sites were clustered with each other within a 10 bp region. (b) DNA methylation also exhibited a clustering effect. However, the pattern is not that strong when all nucleotide contexts are considered. (c) Line graph showing correlation between RNA/DNA m⁵C methylation and distance between cytosine sites. RNA m⁵C methylation showed strong correlation with cytosine sites that are immediately close to each other. The clustering effect of DNA methylation is strong when only CpG context is considered (Figure S4).

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