Extended Data Fig. 4: Biological replicates of the same cell type, from different individuals show a surprisingly low rate of differentially methylated blocks.

We focused on 37 cellular subtypes with n≥3 replicates (e.g. endothelial cells from a specific tissue) and measured the average percentage of methylation blocks (≥3 CpGs) that differ in their methylation by 50% (absolute delta beta), across replicates (shown as Y-axis). Nearly all cellular subtypes (36/37) differ by ≤0.5% of blocks suggesting a very high degree of conservation among replicates. Dotted red line marks the average number of differential blocks between two random samples of different cell types (4.9%). Box plots mark median and interquartile range (IQR), with 1.5*IQR whiskers.