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The missing diversity in human epigenomic studies

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Recent work has highlighted a lack of diversity in genomic studies. However, less attention has been given to epigenomics. Here, we show that epigenomic studies are lacking in diversity and propose several solutions to address this problem.

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Fig. 1: Diversity in epigenomic data samples over time.
Fig. 2: Diversity in epigenomic data samples by assay.

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Acknowledgements

This project was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (C.E.B. and S.I.B.) and National Institutes of Health R01 MD012765, HL163972, DK117445 (grants to N.F.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Charles E. Breeze & Sonja I. Berndt

  2. UCL Cancer Institute, University College London, London, UK

    Charles E. Breeze & Stephan Beck

  3. Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Nora Franceschini

Authors
  1. Charles E. Breeze
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  2. Stephan Beck
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  3. Sonja I. Berndt
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  4. Nora Franceschini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Charles E. Breeze.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Table

Experiment-specific information from publicly available IHEC data (downloaded 20 July 2021). Information includes ethnicity, experiment ID, assay, target of assay, biosample summary, biosample term name, lab, project status, and date of release of the experiment.

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Breeze, C.E., Beck, S., Berndt, S.I. et al. The missing diversity in human epigenomic studies. Nat Genet 54, 737–739 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01081-4

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