Table 2.

Analyses of the divergence of whole-genome methylation between humans and closely related primates

	Species	Tissue/cell type	Method	Patterns of conservation and divergence
Pai et al. (2011)	Human, chimpanzee	Heart, liver, kidney	Illumina 27K Chip	Substantial inter-tissue conservation across species. 12–18% of interspecies differences in expression are associated with promoter methylation differences
Molaro et al. (2011)	Human, chimpanzee	Sperm	WGBS	Average correlation between the two species is 0.87
				Reported that human-specific hypo-methylated regions occur near genes encoding neurological functions
Martin et al. (2011)	Human, chimpanzee, orangutan	Neutrophils	HpaII digestion and MethylSeq	High conservation methylome-wide except for ∼10% CpG island-like regions
Hodges et al. (2011)	Human, chimpanzee	HSPC, B cells, neutrophils	WGBS	Hypo-methylated regions show significant overlap between species. Inter-tissue variability of region-length is similar in humans and chimpanzees
Zeng et al. (2012)	Human, chimpanzee	Prefrontal cortex	WGBS	3.5% (474/13,454) promoters are differentially methylated
Wang et al. (2012)	Human, macaque	Prefrontal cortex	MeDIP-Chip and SEQUENOM MassARRAY	Patterns of methylation of the brain are similar, with only few differentially methylated regions identified.
				Identified two differentially methylated regions with protein-conservation involved in neural functions
Hernando-Herraez et al. (2013)	Human, chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, orangutan	Peripheral blood	Illumina 450K Chip	Correspondence between protein sequence and gene regulation except for ∼800 genes.184 genes perfectly conserved at protein level show epigenetic differences between humans and chimpanzees