How does ChIP work?

Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is an antibody-based technology used to selectively enrich specific DNA-binding proteins and their DNA targets. It is used to analyze protein-DNA interactions across the whole genome or a subset of genes. Chip identifies the binding sites of DNA-associated proteins which can be utilized to give us information about chromatin and gene transcription. ChIP generally starts with the crosslinking of DNA-protein complexes. The samples are then fragmented and treated with an exonuclease to trim unbound oligonucleotides. Then, protein-specific antibodies are used to immunoprecipitate the DNA-protein complex. Next, the DNA is extracted and sequenced, displaying high-quality sequences of the protein-binding sites.