Abstract
The relationship between DNA methylation and chromatin structure is still largely unknown. By analyzing a large set of published sequencing data, we observed a long-range power law correlation of DNA methylation with cell class-specific scaling exponents in the range of tens of kilobases. We showed that such cell class-specific scaling exponents are caused by different patchiness of DNA methylation in different cells. By modeling the chromatin structure using high-resolution chromosome conformation capture data and mapping the methylation level onto the modeled structure, we demonstrated that the patchiness of DNA methylation is related to chromatin structure. The scaling exponents of the power law correlation are thus a display of the spatial organization of chromatin. Besides the long-range correlation, we also showed that the local correlation of DNA methylation is associated with nucleosome positioning. The local correlation of partially methylated domains is different from that of nonpartially methylated domains, suggesting that their chromatin structures differ at the scale of several hundred base pairs (covering a few nucleosomes). Our study provides a novel, to our knowledge, view of the spatial organization of chromatin structure from a perspective of DNA methylation, in which both long-range and local correlations of DNA methylation along the genome reflect the spatial organization of chromatin.