The Children's Research Institute at the Medical College of Wisconsin has used Porvair Filtration's Chromatrap technology to develop more efficient and precise chromatin immunoprecipitation assays.
The Children's Research Institute's (CRI) translational research programmes are targeted to find life-saving discoveries and cures in the diseases that affect children and interventions that enhance quality of life for children and families living with chronic health conditions.
Over the last few months, Dr Ronald N Hines, professor of paediatrics, pharmacology and toxicology at the CRI has compared the efficacy of Chromatrap with traditional bead-based chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) technologies in his research into known regulatory elements controlling ontogeny of important human drug metabolising enzymes such as CYP3A4.
He said: 'I believe the bead-based system gave us a relatively small signal-to-noise ratio such that even minor deviations caused by variation in the efficiency of the bead system (for whatever reason) resulted in considerable variation in the assay.
'By comparison, I think the most substantial advantage of the Chromatrap system is more efficient and less variable trapping of the immunoprecipitated chromatin such that the signal-to-noise ratio is larger and influenced less by minor variations in trapping efficiency,' he added.
The Chromatrap spin-column approach is said to offer advantages compared with methods based on agarose or magnetic beads, which involve many steps of separation, pipetting and re-suspension.
The Biovyon protein A discs used in Chromatrap spin columns have a proprietary internal structure composed of pores that have inner surfaces specifically designed to maximise chromatin capture efficiency.
Porvair's disc base material is chemically inert, reducing incidences of non-specific binding.
All chromatin capture reactions take place inside the rigid porous disc; therefore there is no need for the many repetitive stages of suspension, collection and re-suspension by pipetting.
Additionally, no pre-blocking step is required.
The Chromatrap spin-column protocol allows washing steps that are fast, efficient and less prone to error and the flow-through characteristics of the column ensure good sample mixing and washing during the assay.
