Importantly, we also found alterations in DNA methylation in an AREG pseudogene, which lies directly downstream of AREG (Fig. 3C). When examining these two regions, both the sequence structure and regulatory similarity were noted as they are 99% homologous when blasted against the reference genome. Since Bismark only reports unique matches, the multi-mapping scenario of AREG and its pseudogene made it difficult to investigate the methylation alternations in these two regions. However, the analysis was possible by masking AREG pseudogene and mapping AREG, and vice-versa for AREG pseudogene. We attempted to investigate this further by using bisulfite conversion with methylation specific PCR to confirm altered CpGs within this region. However, the sequence similarity between these two regions and difficulty designing unique primers for bisulfite converted DNA proved that this analysis was technically unfeasible.