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The dynamic post-translational modification (PTM) of histones is a key regulatory mechanism for many DNA-templated processes, including transcription, replication and DNA repair1,2. The ability to determine the abundance and precise localization of modified histones concomitant with these processes is therefore critical to understanding their regulation under different conditions in the cell. The development of chromatin immunoprecipitation (chIP) as a method largely stemmed from biochemical studies of the interactions of proteins with DNA, particularly in vitro methods using chemical crosslinkers, coupled with the need to evaluate the dynamic nature of protein-DNA interactions in vivo and at specific regions of the genome3,4,5. The advancement of quantitative PCR (qPCR) and sequencing technologies has also expanded the ability to perform chIP experiments with quantitative comparisons and across whole genomes, making it a powerful tool for dissecting DNA-protein interactions at multiple levels.
Currently, chIP is a required method for any research group interested in chromatin-mediated regulation of the genome as there are no comparable methods for directly interrogating the physical link between a modified histone and a specific genomic locus in vivo. Although variations of this method using next generation sequencing to map histone modifications throughout the genome6,7 are available, these approaches may address different scientific questions and their scale, cost and technical resources may be limiting for some research groups. Additionally, targeted chIP-qPCR is necessary to complement these approaches by providing methods to both optimize the chIP protocol prior to sequencing and to validate results from the epigenomic datasets. Mass spectrometry based approaches for identifying the full complement of histone marks associated with genomic regions have also emerged8,9,10,11, however, these approaches have some limitations regarding which regions of the genome can be probed and they require technical expertise and instrumentation that will not be available to all research groups. Therefore, chIP remains a foundational method for analyzing the abundance and distribution of histone modifications under diverse conditions for all research groups interested in epigenetics, chromatin and the regulation of genomic functions.
Here, we describe a method for chIP using the budding yeast model Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae) to investigate the distribution of histone PTMs at chromatin. This approach relies on a number of core components of chIP protocols developed in yeast and also applied to diverse model systems12,13. Interactions between modified histones and DNA in the cell are preserved by crosslinking with formaldehyde. Following lysate preparation, chromatin fragments are solubilized into uniformly-sized fragments by digestion with micrococcal nuclease. Immunoprecipitation of the modified histones is performed with either commercial or lab-generated antibodies and any associated DNA is isolated and analyzed for enrichment at particular genomic regions using qPCR (Figure 1). For many histone modifications, the quantity of DNA obtained from this protocol is sufficient for testing more than 25 different genomic loci by qPCR.
This chIP method is highly versatile for monitoring the distribution of a single histone modification across multiple mutant strains or environmental conditions, or for testing multiple histone modifications in wildtype cells at a number of genomic loci. Furthermore, numerous components of the protocol are easily adjustable to optimize detection of either highly- or lowly-abundant histone marks. Finally, performing chIP of modified histones in budding yeast provides the opportunity to use key controls for antibody specificity that are largely unavailable in other systems. Namely, yeast strains can be generated that carry point mutations in histone residues that are targeted for modification, and, in some cases, there is only a single enzyme that catalyzes modification on a particular histone residue (e.g. histone lysine methyltransferases). Therefore, chIP can be performed in either the histone mutant or enzyme deletion strains to assay the extent to which non-specific binding of the antibody may be occurring and generating false positive results. This control is particularly valuable for newly-developed antibodies, and may even be used to validate antibody specificity for conserved histone modifications prior to their use in other systems. This approach complements other methods to test antibody specificity that distinguish among different modification states (such as mono-, di- and tri-methylation), including probing arrays of modified peptides and performing western blots of histones or nucleosomes with defined modifications. Overall, chIP in budding yeast is a powerful method for assessing the dynamics of histone PTMs throughout the genome and dissecting the mechanisms governing their regulation.