Chromatin immunoprecipitation using microarrays.
Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is a powerful procedure to investigate the interactions between proteins and DNA. ChIP-chip combines chromatin immunoprecipitation and DNA microarray analysis to identify protein-DNA interactions that occur in vivo. This genome-wide analysis of protein-DNA association is carried out in several steps including chemical cross-linking, cell lysis, DNA fragmentation and immunoaffinity purification that allow the identification of DNA interactions and provide a powerful tool for genome-wide investigations. Immunoprecipitated DNA fragments associated with the desired protein are amplified, labelled and hybridized to DNA microarrays to detect enriched signals compared to a labelled reference sample.