On the thermodynamics of DNA methylation process

DNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism that plays important roles in various biological processes including transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation, genomic imprinting, aging, and stress response to environmental changes and disease. Consistent with thermodynamic principles acting within living systems and the application of maximum entropy principle, we propose a theoretical framework to understand and decode the DNA methylation process. A central tenet of this argument is that the probability density function of DNA methylation information-divergence summarizes the statistical biophysics underlying spontaneous methylation background and implicitly bears on the channel capacity of molecular machines conforming to Shannon's capacity theorem. On this theoretical basis, contributions from the molecular machine (enzyme) logical operations to Gibb entropy (S) and Helmholtz free energy (F) are intrinsic. Application to the estimations of S on datasets from Arabidopsis thaliana suggests that, as a thermodynamic state variable, individual methylome entropy is completely determined by the current state of the system, which in biological terms translates to a correspondence between estimated entropy values and observable phenotypic state. In patients with different types of cancer, results suggest that a significant information loss occurs in the transition from differentiated (healthy) tissues to cancer cells. This type of analysis may have important implications for early-stage diagnostics. The analysis of entropy fluctuations on experimental datasets revealed existence of restrictions on the magnitude of genome-wide methylation changes originating by organismal response to environmental changes. Only dysfunctional stages observed in the Arabidopsis mutant met1 and in cancer cells do not conform to these rules.

Automated summary

DNA methylation is an important epigenetic mechanism involved in various biological processes. A theoretical framework based on thermodynamic principles has been proposed to understand and decode the DNA methylation process. The analysis of entropy fluctuations on experimental datasets reveals restrictions on genome-wide methylation changes, with exceptions found in certain mutant and cancer cells.