CMImpute: cross-species and tissue imputation of species-level DNA methylation samples across mammalian species

Abstract The large-scale application of the mammalian methylation array has substantially expanded the availability of DNA methylation data in mammalian species. However, this data captures only a small portion of species-tissue combinations. To address this, we develop CMImpute (Cross-species Methylation Imputation), a method based on a conditional variational autoencoder, to impute DNA methylation representing species-tissue combinations. We demonstrate that CMImpute achieves strong sample-wise correlation between imputed and observed values. Using CMImpute and data from 348 species and 59 tissue types, we impute methylation data for 19,786 new species-tissue combinations. We expect CMImpute will be a useful resource for DNA methylation analyses.