The phrase "average methylation levels" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in scientific or research contexts, particularly in discussions related to genetics, epigenetics, or molecular biology.
Example: "The study aimed to compare the average methylation levels between healthy individuals and those with the disease."
Alternatives: "mean methylation levels" or "typical methylation levels.".
We also observed that, for the seven somatic DMRs where the parent of origin is published as paternally methylated, the average methylation levels were between 35%-65% across all tissues, independent of expression and are not tissue specifically variable.
Remarkable stability of the DNA methylation imprint was observed in all germ-line DMRs and paternally methylated somatic DMRs (which maintained average methylation levels of between 35% - 65% in all somatic tissues, independent of gene expression).
Our tissue-specific selection of differentially methylated probes was important to identify concerted changes in average methylation levels that occur on top of the epigenetic background of tissue-specific repressive events.
We further stratified CpGs by their average methylation levels and found that the concordance of the majority of unmethylated or methylated CpGs were much better as compared to CpGs with intermediate average methylation levels.
Therefore, it is reasonable to group the nearby CpGs and calculate the average methylation levels.
To test this, we first computed average methylation levels over CpGs undergoing specific hyper or hypomethylation with age.
For this, we selected probes with average methylation levels below 5% across controls and average methylation levels above 25% across tumors.
Furthermore, the average methylation levels in genomic regions varied along with increasing CpG coverage, indicating that the dRRBS strategy can more accurately reflect their average methylation levels.
The resulting samples had the same average methylation levels as the real sample.
Beyond age 7, 7 of these 13 probes demonstrated a continued reduction in average methylation levels.
The average methylation levels among populations were statistically similar (Additional file 2: Figure S4).
