Whole-genome DNA methylation profile of female Gobiocypris rarus brains at three age stages

Gobiocypris rarus is an endemic cyprinid fish in China with a lifespan of up to nine years under artificial breeding conditions and is widely used in biological and toxicological studies. However, genome-wide DNA methylation profiles across adult aging stages in this species remain limited. In this study, brain samples from 27 female individuals at three representative adult stages (8, 44, and 74 months) were subjected to whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS). After quality filtering to remove low-quality reads, adaptor sequences, and ambiguous bases, an average of 41.36 Gb clean bases per sample was obtained. Three methylation contexts (CG, CHG, and CHH) were identified, with average methylation proportions of 79.95 ± 1.01%, 1.19 ± 0.14% and 1.13 ± 0.10%, respectively. This dataset provides a high-resolution brain methylome resource across representative adult stages of rare minnow and enables future comparative and integrative epigenetic analyses in teleost species.