Kampmann M.L. et al.
DNA methylation patterns may be used for identification of body fluids and for age estimation of human individuals. We evaluated some of the challenges and pitfalls of studying methylated CpG sites. We compared the methylated CpG analysis of two different methods 1) massively parallel sequencing (MPS) using the Illumina MiSeq and 2) the iPLEX assay on the MassARRAY® System. On the Illumina MiSeq, the standard deviation of the fraction of methylation was under 3% between replicates, whereas the reproducibility of the MassARRAY® was very difficult to achieve. We tested the denaturation and conversion times of the Premium Bisulfite kit (Diagenode) in order to optimise the conversion rate and minimise DNA degradation. Finally, we tested the reproducibility of the methylation patterns using the Illumina MiSeq.