Evaluation of acute myeloid leukemia blast percentage on MethylC-Capture Sequencing results

Aberrant DNA methylation is often related to the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic response of acute myeloid leukemia (AML); however, relevant studies on the relationship between bone marrow myeloblast percentage and the DNA methylation level in AML have not been reported. We evaluated the effects of AML blast percentage on DNA methylation level using the MethylC-capture sequencing (MCC-Seq) approach based on next-generation sequencing (NGS) and found that the methylation level of both genome-wide and promoter regions significantly increased when the percentage of AML blasts reached >= 40%, indicating that an accurate DNA methylation level in cancer cells can be obtained when the bone marrow samples of AML patients have more than 40% myeloblasts.