Fig. 3

Inventory of the sperm-soma DMRs putatively regulating promoters of 2462 testicular germ cell-specific genes. (a) Flow chart of the discovery of 2764 sperm-soma DMRs using blood datasets as somatic representatives. DMRs were required to cover at least 10 CpGs with at least 80% difference in methylation, minimum coverage of 5 reads and a maximum q value of 0.05. (b) Box plots showing the distribution of the methylation values of 2640 DMRs less methylated in sperm than in blood (left) and 121 DMRs more methylated in sperm than in blood (right) (Additional file 1: Table S5). Datasets from Laurentino et al. [20] appear in white (BL1 and BL2—blood, SP1 and SP2—sperm), NC sperm samples in teal, AMO sperm samples in orange and NMO sperm samples in purple. Box plot elements are defined as follows: center line: median; box limits: upper and lower quartiles; whiskers: 1.5× interquartile range; points: outliers