Consistent with the view that DNAme is tissue-specific, our DNAme signature - derived from peripheral blood cells from women with known BRCA1 status - was not able to predict invasive breast cancer (Figure 3B) or invasive non-breast cancer (Additional file 10B) in the buccal cell DNAme profiles obtained at the same time from the same women who provided blood DNA. The gene discussed is BRCA1; the disease is breast cancer.