Investigation of brain from infants with child abuse regarding to morphological change and epigenetic change such as DNA methylation.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate brain from infants with child abuse regarding to morphological change and epigenetic change such as DNA methylation. Morphological change of the brain was investigated using postmortem CT prior to autopsy, naked eye examination and microscopic examination of the brain tissue. As control, brains were used from cases of sudden or unexpected death. There was any significant morphological difference in brains between the affected person and controls. Next, to investigate DNA methylation in brains, preliminary experiments were carried out. We demonstrated that methylation specific PCR amplification could be carried out using DNA prepared from the paraffin. embedded brain tissues which had been fixed by formaldehyde. However, it was invalid to evaluate the extent of DNA methylation. Therefore, we need a method to discover a gene of which methylation is significantly associated with stress in infants. Thus, we are developing a method for enrichment of methylated DNA using precipitation of methylated DNA with methylation binding domain 1 protein, followed by sequencing. In future, it might be possible to identify a gene of which methylation is significantly associated with stress in infants by the method.