John T. Lis and David Gilmour are credited with discovering chromatin immunoprecipitation, which was the first of the various immunoprecipitation techniques to be used. Their work, which was published in 1984, was the first paper to discuss immunoprecipitation, and processing DNA strands, which would later be called chromatin immunoprecipitation. Over the next several years after their discovery, the principles of chromatin immunoprecipitation were expanded and used in several other applications.