DNA Methylation Drift: Maintenance Fidelity Simulator

Every time a cell divides, its DNA methylation pattern has to be copied along with the sequence itself — and that copying is imperfect. This simulator models a stretch of double-stranded DNA carrying 16 CpG dyads across a population of 200 lineages, applying the real molecular tug-of-war between DNMT1 maintenance methylation, aberrant de novo methylation and active TET-mediated demethylation at every simulated cell division. Watch the helix's methylation marks (rendered as a live β-value heatmap on the base-pair rungs) drift from a clean starting pattern toward a noisy, heterogeneous mosaic, while the mean methylation level and per-site Shannon entropy track exactly the quantities real DNA-methylation "epigenetic clocks" measure to estimate biological age.