Abstract
Chromatin and transcriptional processes are among the most intensively studied fields of biology today. The introduction of chromatin immunoprecipitations (ChIP) represents a major advancement in this area. This powerful method allows researchers to probe specific protein-DNA interactions in vivo and to estimate the density of proteins at specific sites genome-wide. We have introduced several improvements to the traditional ChIP assay, which simplify the procedure, greatly reducing the time and labor required to complete the assay. The simplicity of the method yields highly reproducible results. Our improvements facilitate the probing of multiple proteins in a single experiment, which allows for the simultaneous monitoring of many genomic events. This method is particularly useful in kinetic studies where multiple samples are processed at the same time. Starting with sheared chromatin, PCR-ready DNA can be isolated from 16–24 ChIP samples in 4–6 h using the fast method.
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Acknowledgements
We thank members of the K.B. lab for valuable discussions of the method. This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health (DK45978 and GM45134) and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (K.B.).
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Nelson, J., Denisenko, O. & Bomsztyk, K. Protocol for the fast chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) method. Nat Protoc 1, 179–185 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2006.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2006.27
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