Fig. 7

Validation of the DNA methylation status of seven GE-dMHBs in 200 cows. A Correlation plot of GE-dMHBs located in the first exon of TRAK1 (GE-dMHBs-TRAK1) as example, showing strong positive correlation between CpG sites detected in GE-dMHBs. B List of seven GE-dMHBs subjected to targeted bisulfite amplicon sequencing in 200 cows. C Principal component analysis plot illustrating the clustering of cows with HSCC into two sub-groups (HSCC1 and HSCC2) with extremely different methylation status of the GE-dMHBs. D, E Boxplot showing the significantly different methylation status of GE-dMHBs-TRAK1 (D) and GE-dMHBs-MEF2A (E) between three groups. *** denotes a statistically significant difference between the corresponding groups, with p < 0.05. F, G Boxplot showing the significantly different methylation status of GE-dMHBs-TRAK1 (F) and GE-dMHBs-MEF2A (G) between cows with different milk yield, including high (HMY, ≥ 40 kg/day, n = 69), middle (MMY, 30 ~ 40 kg/day, n = 73), and low milk yield (LMY, ≤ 30 kg/day, n = 58). The number atop each bar represents the p-value between the respective groups. Detailed data on the depicted findings are found in Supplementary Table 17