MLML: consistent simultaneous estimates of DNA methylation and hydroxymethylation

Motivation: The two major epigenetic modifications of cytosines, 5-methylcytosine (5-mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC), coexist with each other in a range of mammalian cell populations. Increasing evidence points to important roles of 5-hmC in demethylation of 5-mC and epigenomic regulation in development. Recently developed experimental methods allow direct single-base profiling of either 5-hmC or 5-mC. Meaningful analyses seem to require combining these experiments with bisulfite sequencing, but doing so naively produces inconsistent estimates of 5-mC or 5-hmC levels. Results: We present a method to jointly model read counts from bisulfite sequencing, oxidative bisulfite sequencing and Tet-Assisted Bisulfite sequencing, providing simultaneous estimates of 5-hmC and 5-mC levels that are consistent across experiment types.