Roche Nimblegen will align its ChIP-chip high-density microarrays with Sigma-Aldrich's Genomeplex in a collaboration that will advance chromatin immunoprecipitation on microarray (ChIP-chip) research.
The combination of platforms will allow researchers to effectively study the entire genome for epigenetic interactions between DNA and DNA-binding proteins to determine regions of the genome that are transcriptionally active or repressed and the mechanisms that regulate these processes.
Understanding the fundamental epigenomic and genomic regulatory pathways underlying normal cell growth and tissue differentiation, as well as changes in regulatory control associated with disease, is crucial for the development of drugs that target these pathways.
To facilitate the ChIP-chip workflow, Roche Nimblegen and Sigma-Aldrich will publish protocols for ChIP-chip research and provide technical support to researchers integrating the two technologies, as well as co-market their products.
ChIP-chip is a powerful tool that combines chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) with microarrays to understand DNA-protein interactions.
The ChIP step deploys a specific antibody against a regulatory protein of interest, which results in the enrichment of DNA fragments bound to the target protein.
Usually these enriched DNA fractions are at very low concentrations and need to be further amplified for detection.
The technologies from Sigma-Aldrich and Roche Nimblegen facilitate effective ChIP-chip research by addressing two critical bottlenecks in the workflow: efficient amplification of targeted sections of DNA and high-resolution microarray detection.
Genomeplex amplifies targeted small (less than 200bp) DNA fragments in an efficient and unbiased manner.
The amplified genome can then be analysed on the high density (up to 2.1 million probes per array), long oligonucleotide ChIP-chip arrays, to examine the interactions between DNA and proteins such as transcription factors, histones and polymerases.
With the whole genome effectively amplified by Genomeplex, analysis on Roche Nimblegen high-density arrays can reveal rare protein-DNA interactions with a high signal-to-noise ratio and sensitivity.
