Fig. 2

GR gene (NR3C1) proximal promoter with primer locations for bisulfite sequencing, MSP, and MeDIP-qPCR. The gene consists of eight coding exons (2-9α/β) and nine untranslated alternative first exons which are located in the distal and proximal promoter regions. The distal promoter is located approximately 30 kb upstream of the coding exons, and unlike the proximal promoter, it has minimal activity in the breast. The GR proximal promoter spans a 3 kb region approximately 5 kb upstream from the translation start site in exon 2 and contains seven alternative first exons (blue boxes). Primers for bisulfite sequencing (green bars depict the regions amplified by each primer set) were designed spanning the proximal promoter region and were used for our singleplex and multiplex GR bisulfite sequencing assay. MSP primer set regions are shown in purple and the location of qPCR primer sets for MeDIP-qPCR, performed in our previous study [24], are shown in orange. Genomic coordinates (hg19) for these regions are reported in Additional file 2: Table S2