Fig. 1

WGBS reveals that MBC methylation profiles differ from DFS and H, which are similar. a Heat scatterplots show % methylation values for pair-wise comparisons of three study groups. Numbers on the upper right corner denote Pearson correlation coefficients. The histograms on the diagonal are frequency of % methylation per cytosine for each pool. MBC demonstrates a shift to the left compared to the DFS and H, indicating genome-wide hypomethylation. b Hierarchical clustering of methylation profiles for each pool using Pearson’s correlation distance and Ward’s clustering method. c Principal Component Analysis of the methylation profiles of each cfDNA pool, showing PC1 and PC2 for each sample. Samples closer to each other in clustering or principal component space are similar in their methylation profiles