A team led by CRG Barcelona deploys EPI-Clone, a targeted single-cell DNA methylation profiling method, to reconstruct clonal trajectories and quantify how blood stem cell diversity erodes with age, uncovering myeloid-biased clone expansion and its role in inflammaging.
Key points
- EPI-Clone integrates targeted single-cell CpG methylation profiling on the Tapestri platform to capture clonal barcodes across 230,358 cells.
- Aged mice and human donors exhibit up to 70% dominance of a few HSC clones, with a shift toward myeloid-biased hematopoiesis linked to inflammaging.
- Distinct CpG subsets reflect both differentiation stage and stochastic epimutations, enabling simultaneous lineage mapping and clonal barcode generation.
Why it matters: This approach enables precise tracking of HSC clonal dynamics, offering insights into inflammaging mechanisms and potential early biomarkers of age-related hematologic risk.
Q&A
- What is EPI-Clone?
- How does DNA methylation barcoding work?
- What causes inflammaging?
- Why use single-cell sequencing?
