Epigenetics specialist Epigentek has developed a microplate-based immunoprecipitation method to rapidly enrich hydroxymethylated DNA in less than three hours.
The method of hydroxymethylated DNA immunoprecipitation is said to emphasise greater speed, throughput level and efficiency to assist in studies of gene-specific hydroxymethylation.
This method is incorporated into a new product: the Epiquik Hydroxymethylated DNA Immunoprecipitation (hMeDIP) kit, which can be used to capture hydroxymethylated DNA from any species in a fast and high-throughput format.
5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmc) is a modified cytosine discovered in animal tissues in 2009.
Recent research suggests that 5-hmc may play an important role in regulation of DNA methylation, chromatin remodelling, and gene expression, especially in brain-specific gene regulation.
However, a complete understanding of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine's functions has been difficult as the inability of currently used DNA methylation analysis methods to distinguish 5-hydroxymethylcytosine from 5-methylcytosine limits the amount of information researchers can gain about the gene-specific distribution of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine.
Therefore, Epigentek said it is considered especially important for the epigenetics community to identify hydroxymethylation status in specific gene loci, which would help to better understand methylation-based epigenetic regulations of gene function.
With proprietary reagents and a reproducible hMeDIP technique, Epigentek's kit allows researchers to selectively capture double-stranded or single-stranded DNA fragments containing 5-hmC from as low as 0.1ug of input DNA.
The flexibility of the microplate format permits either manual or high-throughput processing with a positive-negative control enrichment ratio of greater than 1,000.
The kit is compatible with various downstream analysis workflows including hMeDIP-PCR and hMeDIP-chip.
The Epiquik hMeDIP kit is said to complement Epigentek's Methylflash line for global DNA hydroxymethylation quantification.
