New publication in "Nucleic Acids Research"

In this work, we employed promiscuous chromatin binding of a Zinc finger fused catalytic domain of the DNA methyltransferase DNMT3A to introduce DNA methylation at CpG island (CGIs). This approach allowed us for the first time to systematically investigate the efficiency and stability of the introduced DNA methylation and the consequent changes of the epigenome network in a genome-wide level at several thousand CGIs. We observed efficient methylation at many thousand CGIs, but its rapid loss at most of the sites. Partially stable methylation was observed at about 1000 CGIs, which show an enrichment of the H3K27me3 modification. Globally, introduced DNA methylation strongly correlated with a decrease in gene expression indicating a direct gene silencing effect of DNA methylation at CGIs.