Description

ChILT - an Immunoprecipitation-free Epigenome Profiling Technology

Yasuyuki Ohkawa

Medical Institute of Bioregulation, Kyushu University

Chromatin immunoprecipitation by sequencing (ChIP-seq) has been the de facto standard technology in the analysis of chromatin states in cells and tissues. Despite its success, it has proved to be a formidable problem to expand genome coverage by ChIP-seq with a small number of cells as in the case of single cells. The limited efficiency of antigen-antibody complex reaction in the solution has been implicated to be the major obstacle in improving genome coverage at the single cell level. We have established an immunoprecipitaion-free epigenome profiling method called Chromatin

Integration Labeling Technology (ChILT) by focusing on an immunostaining technique for the visualization of nuclear proteins at the single molecular level to capture genomic regions around nuclear proteins reacting to the antibody. ChILT has successfully obtained genomic information around nuclear antigens such as histone modifications. We will discuss the potential of this new technology in single cell epigenome profiling.