Investigating the potential of single-cell DNA methylation data to detect allele-specific methylation and imprinting

Allele-specific methylation (ASM) is an epigenetic modification whereby one parental allele becomes methylated and the other unmethylated at a specific locus. ASM is most often driven by the presence of nearby heterozygous variants that influence methylation, but also occurs somatically in the context of genomic imprinting. In this study, we investigate ASM using publicly available single-cell reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (scRRBS) data on 608 B cells sampled from six healthy B cell samples and 1,230 cells from 11 chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) samples. We developed a likelihood-based criterion to test whether a CpG exhibited ASM, based on the distributions of methylated and unmethylated reads both within and across cells. Applying our likelihood ratio test, 65,998 CpG sites exhibited ASM in healthy B cell samples according to a Bonferroni criterion (p < 8.4 × 10−9), and 32,862 CpG sites exhibited ASM in CLL samples (p < 8.5 × 10−9). We also called ASM at the sample level. To evaluate the accuracy of our method, we called heterozygous variants from the scRRBS data, which enabled variant-based calls of ASM within each cell. Comparing sample-level ASM calls to the variant-based measures of ASM, we observed a positive predictive value of 76%–100% across samples. We observed high concordance of ASM across samples and an overrepresentation of ASM in previously reported imprinted genes and genes with imprinting binding motifs. Our study demonstrates that single-cell bisulfite sequencing is a potentially powerful tool to investigate ASM, especially as studies expand to increase the number of samples and cells sequenced.