AUTHOR=Wang Zhenxing , Liu Yongzhuang , Wang Yadong TITLE=MGMIN: A Normalization Method for Correcting Probe Design Bias in Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChips JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics VOLUME=11 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2020.538492 DOI=10.3389/fgene.2020.538492 ISSN=1664-8021 ABSTRACT=

The Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 Beadchips have been widely utilized in epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS). However, the existing two types of probes (type I and type II), with the distribution of measurements of probes and dynamic range different, may bias downstream analyses. Here, we propose a method, MGMIN (M-values Gaussian-MIxture Normalization), to correct the probe designs based on M-values of DNA methylation. Our strategy includes fitting Gaussian mixture distributions to type I and type II probes separately, a transformation of M-values into quantiles and finally a dilation transformation based on M-values of DNA methylation to maintain the continuity of the data. Our method is validated on several public datasets on reducing probe design bias, reducing the technical variation and improving the ability to find biologically differential methylation signals. The results show that MGMIN achieves competitive performances compared to BMIQ which is a well-known normalization method on β-values of DNA methylation.