Pecific DM sites discovered by each sorting protocol further supports our hypothesis of heterotopic cell doublet contamination in the standard protocol. This contamination appears to have a much greater effect on nRBC DNAm than on T cell or monocyte DNAm. We attribute this to the relatively low proportion ( 5?0 ) of RBCs that was nucleated in our samplesde Goede et al. Clinical Epigenetics (2015) 7:Page 5 ofFig. 3 DNAm profiles of cord blood cells isolated using the stringent FACS strategy. a Unsupervised Euclidean clustering of genome-wide DNAm (440,315 CpG sites) in CD4 and CD8 T cells (CD4T and CD8T, respectively), monocytes (Mo), and nRBCs isolated by a stringent FACS protocol; letters in the I-CBP112 supplier sample labels indicate different cord blood donors. b Number of large magnitude DM sites (FDR <5 , || >0.20) between nRBCs and CD4 T cells, nRBCs and monocytes, and CD4 T cells and monocytes sorted using a stringent approach. c Overlap of cell-specific DM sites (FDR <5 , || >0.20) identified in the standard versus stringent sorting protocols for c T cells, d monocytes, and e nRBCs. Note that the stringent protocol identified a large number of additional DM sites in T cells and that the nRBC DM sites found by the two sorting protocols showed more differences than similaritiesTable 1 Number of cell-specific DM CpG sites (FDR <5 ) following the standard and stringent FACS strategiesMinimum || NA 0.05 0.10 0.20 0.30 0.40 0.50 0.60 0.70 0.80 nRBCs, standard FACS 61,405 38,295 11,848 2338 457 17 0 0 0 0 nRBCs, stringent FACS 197,237 144,949 63,099 8982 2628 648 41 1 0 0 Monocytes, standard FACS 41,451 32,558 22,829 11,855 6486 3520 1884 908 255 3 Monocytes, stringent FACS 80,600 32,846 14,864 5940 3162 1757 878 319 51 1 T cells, standard FACS 39,284 23,060 10,868 2602 879 292 48 2 0 0 T cells, stringent FACS 111,965 50,621 27,420 12,014 5474 2600 1268 553 158de Goede et al. Clinical Epigenetics (2015) 7:Page 6 ofFig. 4 DNAm changes in nRBCs, T cells, and monocytes with FACS strategy at their top DM sites. Density distributions of DNAm ( values) at DM CpG sites (FDR <5 , || >0.20) for each of the three cell types, comparing the two sorting methods. DM sites were identified using data from samples sorted by the stringent protocol only. The distributions suggest that nRBCs are most affected by the sorting protocol. a 8982 nRBC DM sites. b 12,014 CD4 T cell DM sites. c 5940 monocyte DM sites(Fig. 6). The impact of heterotopic contamination by WBCs on the DNAm profile of sorted nRBCs is more obvious than the reverse, since all WBCs are nucleated. However, since the proportion of nRBCs can be as high as 50 of all nucleated cells in cord blood [17?9], we expect that PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27607577 cross-contamination during FACS can have a major impact on the DNAm profile of sorted WBCs in a subset of cases.Erythroid-specific DM sitesTo provide a way to evaluate how DNAm profiles are impacted by a mixture of blood cells, we defined erythroid lineage-specific DNAm markers. DNAm of B cells, CD4 and CD8 T cells, granulocytes, monocytes, and natural kills (NK) cells sorted using the stringent FACS strategy were compared to stringently sorted nRBCs. For each WBC population, over 210,000 of the 440,315 CpG sites analyzed showed statistically significantly different DNAm from nRBCs (FDR <5 ). Eight of these DM sites, termed erythroid DNAm markers, were selected based on a cell type average difference in DNAm >0.50 between nRBCs and every other cell type (Table 2; Additional file 1: Fig.