What is ChIP on Chip?

What is ChIP on Chip?

It is a deadly combination of Chromatin Immuno Precipitation with Microarray to provide a powerful technique for identifying the functional DNA elements within a genome. Functional elements can be promoters, silencers, enhancers, Chromatin domain boundaries, heterochromatin proteins, and histones etc, because these elements are normally bound with specific proteins like transcription factors. This can provide a large quantum of data that is unbiased and can provide information on a whole genome basis.

Steps involved:-

Formaldehyde cross linking of proteins.

Shearing of DNA to smaller fragments.

Immuno pull down using desirable antibody

Reverse cross linking

Amplifying and labeling of pulled down fragments

Hybridization on to a Microarray (Chip)

Data analysis.

For example if one is looking for the genome wide association of certain histone variants, use an antibody against the variant of interest. After the hybridization on to the Chip you can make out to which regions of the genome this particular variant is associated (like centromere, telomere etc).