With the speed and power of today’s high-throughput sequencers it seems that chromatin immunoprecipitation is the ‘limiting reagent’ in your ChIP-Seq reaction. Usually ChIP-Seq immunoprecipitation and library preparation takes 4 or 5 days, but now a talented team from Uppsala University in Sweden bring forth the library-on-beads ChIP (lobChIP) protocol, which wraps that up into just 1 day.
In lobChIP, the library is prepared from cross-linked chromatin attached to magnetic beads, which allows you to skip the purification step after immunoprecipitation. Furthermore, since ligation is done before reversing the formaldehyde cross-links, the barcoded adapters are added earlier than in standard ChIP (before the elution). This reduces the risk of adaptor dimers and sample contamination.
The results of LobChIP experiments for histone modifications and transcription factors showed a good overall correlation with publicly available ENCODE data. LobChIP works in multiplex with standard PCR strips and multichannel pipettes, and with antibodies against common and rarer histone modifications and transcription factors. LobChIP also has full automation power, which was demonstrated on a pipetting robot.
Moreover:
- LobChIP gave more reproducible results than standard ChIP.
- The lobChIP protocol gave consistent results for multiple histone modifications and transcription factors.
- Finally, lobChIP is system independent, so while it performs great on Illumina’s sequencing platform, it also works on other platforms, such as SOLiD.
So, when it comes down to it, lobChIP can put your ChIP-Seq into an automated high-throughput hyperdrive.
Go from cells to sequencing ready Chip-Seq libraries in just a day over at Epigenetics & Chromatin