Fig. 1

The DNA methylation landscape of cervical carcinoma. a Unsupervised clustering of methylation levels in cervical cancer. Samples are presented in columns, and the 591 most variable CpG loci (mean methylation level β < 0.05 in normal samples and a standard deviation σ > 0.20 in tumor samples) are presented in rows. The three identified clusters were denoted as CIMP-high (n = 20, CpG island methylator phenotype), CIMP-intermediate (n = 69), and CIMP-low (n = 89). Primary tumor features significantly associated across the three clusters (Fisher’s exact test p-value <0.001) are indicated at the top of the heat map. b Differences (p-value < 0.0001) in the methylation levels of the three consensus clusters. The CIMP-high group exhibited significant hypermethylation compared with the other groups. c–e The sample distributions in terms of HPV status, histology, and HPV clade in the three clusters are presented in c–e, respectively