Fig. 1

Flowchart of study approach. Biomarker discovery was performed with the Moss et al. [10] and Reinius et al. [11] datasets. Individual CpG cites with a difference in β-value between leukocytes and all tissues ≥ 0.8 were identified and termed ls-DMPs. ls-DMPs outside of CpG islands were filtered out. We validated each biomarker with (1) in vitro mixes of defined PBMC and intestinal organoid DNA, and (2) hertogeneous saliva samples. To assess how ls-DMPs are reported in the literature, we gathered a range of datasets examining methylation in inflammatory disease and determined the number of reported ls-DMPs. Lastly, to compare our ls-DMPs to current deconvolution methods, we used the TCGA Pan-Cancer atlas to assess the correlation between ls-DMP methylation and the number of leukocytes in each sample