Figure 3. Enrichment of inflammatory Δage-related genes with corresponding differences in methylation.

Among 448 genes whose expression was associated with inflam-matory Δage, 223 genes contained at least one CpG where methylation was associated with inflammatory Δage (defined as differentially methylated genes [DMGs]). In order to assess its significance, we generated one million gene sets, each one containing 448 randomly selected genes and determined how many of the 448 randomly selected genes were DMGs. As shown, each randomly matched gene set contained a mean of 153 methylation genes (min: 109 genes, max: 199 genes), which is much smaller than that of inflammatory Δage-related genes (empirical p-value <1×10⁻⁶). The red triangleindicates the number of DMGs in inflammatory Δage-related genes.