MOTIVATION: Methylation and hydroxylation of cytosines to form 5-methylcytosine (5mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) belong to the most important epigenetic modifications and their vital role in the regulation of gene expression has been widely recognized. Recent experimental techniques allow to infer methylation and hydroxylation levels at CpG dinucleotides but require a sophisticated statistical analysis to achieve accurate estimates. RESULTS: We present H(O)TA, a software tool based on a stochastic modeling approach, which simultaneously analyzes time course data from hairpin bisulfite sequencing and hairpin oxidative bisulfite sequencing. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: : https://mosi.uni-saarland.de/HOTA. CONTACT: [email protected] or [email protected].

DNA methylation and demethylation are opposing processes that when in balance create stable patterns of epigenetic memory. The control of DNA methylation pattern formation by replication dependent and independent demethylation processes has been suggested to be influenced by Tet mediated oxidation of 5mC. Several alternative mechanisms have been proposed suggesting that 5hmC influences either replication dependent maintenance of DNA methylation or replication independent processes of active demethylation. Using high resolution hairpin oxidative bisulfite sequencing data, we precisely determine the amount of 5mC and 5hmC and model the contribution of 5hmC to processes of demethylation in mouse ESCs. We develop an extended hidden Markov model capable of accurately describing the regional contribution of 5hmC to demethylation dynamics. Our analysis shows that 5hmC has a strong impact on replication dependent demethylation, mainly by impairing methylation maintenance.