Report on the 2nd Annual Infinium Humanmethylation450 Array Workshop

The Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip – the successor to their hugely popular HumanMethylation27 BeadChip – is arguably the most prevalent platform for large-scale studies of DNA methylome analysis. After the success of last year’s meeting¹ that discussed initial analysis strategies for this then-new platform, this year’s meeting (held at Queen Mary, University of London) included the presentation of now established pipelines and normalization methods for data analysis, as well as some exciting tools for down-stream analysis. The importance of defining cell composition was a new topic mentioned by most speakers. The epigenome varies between cell types and insuring that methylation differences are related to sample treatment and not a differing cell population is essential. The meeting was attended by 215 computational and bench scientists from 18 countries. There were 11 speakers, a small poster session, and a discussion session. Talks were recorded and are now freely available at http://www.illumina.com/applications/epigenetics/array-based_methylation_analysis/methylation-array-analysis-education.ilmn