RT Journal
A1 Jiang, Peiyong
A1 Xie, Tingting
A1 Ding, Spencer C.
A1 Zhou, Ze
A1 Cheng, Suk Hang
A1 Chan, Rebecca W.Y.
A1 Lee, Wing-Shan
A1 Peng, Wenlei
A1 Wong, John
A1 Wong, Vincent W.S.
A1 Chan, Henry L.Y.
A1 Chan, Stephen L.
A1 Poon, Liona C.Y.
A1 Leung, Tak Y.
A1 Chan, K.C. Allen
A1 Chiu, Rossa W.K.
A1 Lo, Y.M. Dennis
T1 Detection and characterization of jagged ends of double-stranded DNA in plasma
JF Genome Research 
JO Genome Research 
YR 2020 
FD August 01 
VO 30 
IS 8 
SP 1144 
OP 1153 
DO 10.1101/gr.261396.120 
UL http://genome.cshlp.org/content/30/8/1144.abstract 
AB Cell-free DNA in plasma has been used for noninvasive prenatal testing and cancer liquid biopsy. The physical properties of cell-free DNA fragments in plasma, such as fragment sizes and ends, have attracted much recent interest, leading to the emerging field of cell-free DNA fragmentomics. However, one aspect of plasma DNA fragmentomics as to whether double-stranded plasma molecules might carry single-stranded ends, termed a jagged end in this study, remains underexplored. We have developed two approaches for investigating the presence of jagged ends in a plasma DNA pool. These approaches utilized DNA end repair to introduce differential methylation signals between the original sequence and the jagged ends, depending on whether unmethylated or methylated cytosines were used in the DNA end-repair procedure. The majority of plasma DNA molecules (87.8%) were found to bear jagged ends. The jaggedness varied according to plasma DNA fragment sizes and appeared to be in association with nucleosomal patterns. In the plasma of pregnant women, the jaggedness of fetal DNA molecules was higher than that of the maternal counterparts. The jaggedness of plasma DNA correlated with the fetal DNA fraction. Similarly, in the plasma of cancer patients, tumor-derived DNA molecules in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma showed an elevated jaggedness compared with nontumoral DNA. In mouse models, knocking out of the Dnase1 gene reduced jaggedness, whereas knocking out of the Dnase1l3 gene enhanced jaggedness. Hence, plasma DNA jagged ends represent an intrinsic property of plasma DNA and provide a link between nuclease activities and the fragmentation of plasma DNA.