Tobacco Smoking Leads to Extensive Genome-Wide Changes in DNA Methylation

By S. Zeilinger, Brigitte Kühnel, N. Klopp, H. Baurecht, A. Kleinschmidt, C. Gieger, S. Weidinger, E. Lattka, Jerzy Adamski, Annette Peters and 3 more. PLoS ONE, 2013

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Environmental factors such as tobacco smoking may have long-lasting effects on DNA methylation patterns, which might lead to changes in gene expression and in a broader context to the development or progression of various diseases. We conducted an epigenome-wide association study (EWAs) comparing current, former and never smokers from 1793 participants of the population-based KORA F4 panel, with replication in 479 participants from the KORA F3 panel, carried out by the 450K BeadChip with genomic DNA obtained from whole blood. We observed wide-spread differences in the degree of site-specific methylation (with p-values ranging from 9.31E-08 to 2.54E-182) as a function of tobacco smoking in each of the 22 autosomes, with the percent of variance explained by smoking ranging from 1.31 to 41.02. Depending on cessation time and pack-years, methylation levels in former smokers were found to be close to the ones seen in never smokers. In addition, methylation-specific protein binding patterns were observed for cg05575921 within AHRR, which had the highest level of detectable changes in DNA methylation associated with tobacco smoking (–24.40% methylation; p = 2.54E-182), suggesting a regulatory role for gene expression. The results of our study confirm the broad effect of tobacco smoking on the human organism, but also show that quitting tobacco smoking presumably allows regaining the DNA methylation state of never smokers.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1b152ac695e7adfef7903ea8a19a793cc17803a

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Citations in the corpus

DNA Methylation in Newborns and Maternal Smoking in Pregnancy: Genome-wide Consortium Meta-analysis. (2016, positive): “64 3 10 (193)), which has been observed as differentially methylated in relation to smoking in many studies of adults and children.(7,8,10,28,35,53) Our enrichment testing of the genome-wide results is in line with previous findings showing that island shores, enhancers, and DNase I hypersensitive s”
A comparison of reference-based algorithms for correcting cell-type heterogeneity in Epigenome-Wide Association Studies (2017, positive): “probes that mapped to 5 genes within our gold-standard set of 15 smoking-associated genes [30, 37-41] (Methods, Fig.”
Global colorectal cancer burden in 2020 and projections to 2040 (2021, background): “Smoking cessation over 10 years reverses high levels of DNA methylation [92] and reduces the risk of CIMP-high CRC by 50% [93], suggesting the reversibility of increased risk of CRC by smoking.”