Age accelerating condition Healthy control p-value Age acceleration Blood data C h r o n o lo g ic a l A g e CpG site Dataset Averaging across cells ... ... ... ... ... CpG N CpG ...Figure 1: ComputAgeBench: the first comprehensive framework for benchmarking various epigenetic aging clock models.For a dataset 𝑋 , obtained by profiling DNA methylation at CpG sites in bulk blood samples, an aging clock model 𝑓 is trained to distinguish healthy individuals from those with pre-defined aging-accelerating conditions.

The chromatin interaction assays, particularly Hi-C, enable detailed studies of genome architecture in multiple organisms and model systems, resulting in a deeper understanding of gene expression regulation mechanisms mediated by epigenetics. However, the analysis and interpretation of Hi-C data remain challenging due to technical biases, limiting direct comparisons of datasets obtained in different experiments and laboratories. As a result, removing biases from Hi-C-generated chromatin contact matrices is a critical data analysis step. Our novel approach, HiConfidence, eliminates biases from the Hi-C data by weighing chromatin contacts according to their consistency between replicates so that low-quality replicates do not substantially influence the result. The algorithm is effective for the analysis of global changes in chromatin structures such as compartments and topologically associating domains. We apply the HiConfidence approach to several Hi-C datasets with significant technical biases, that could not be analyzed effectively using existing methods, and obtain meaningful biological conclusions. In particular, HiConfidence aids in the study of how changes in histone acetylation pattern affect chromatin organization in Drosophila melanogaster S2 cells. The method is freely available at GitHub: https://github.com/victorykobets/HiConfidence.

High-throughput sequencing of whole genomes and transcriptomes allows one to generate large amounts of sequence data very rapidly and at a low cost. The goal of most mRNA sequencing studies is to perform the comparison of the expression level between different samples. However, given a broad variety of modern sequencing protocols, platforms and versions thereof, it is not clear to what extent the obtained results are consistent across platforms and laboratories. The comparison of 117 human mRNA and genome high-throughput sequencing experiments performed on the Illumina and SOLiD platforms at 26 institutions all over the world demonstrated high dependency of the gene coverage profiles on the producing laboratory. Gene coverage profiles showed laboratory-specific non-uniformity that survived the 3'-bias correction and mappability normalization, suggesting that there are other yet unknown mRNA-associated biases.