Fig. 1

a Representative images of neonatal gut epithelial cells before (left) and after (right) laser capture microdissection (LCM). b Classic multidimensional scaling of WGBS data from NEC and non-NEC colon (left) and ileum (right). c Density plots of CpG methylation levels across the entire genome using WGBS data from NEC or non-NEC colon (left) or ileum (right) (see also Additional file 2: Figure S1). Red lines represent NEC colon/ileum, and blue lines represent non-NEC colon/ileum. d Distribution of differentially methylated NEC-specific CpG sites falling into (top) low methylation (LM) (< 20%), (middle) intermediate methylation (IM) (20–80%) and (lower) high methylation (HM) (> 80%) categories across all sites and different genomic elements and combinations thereof