An Integrated and Semiautomated Microscaled Approach to Profile Cis-Regulatory Elements by Histone Modification ChIP-Seq for Large-Scale Epigenetic Studies.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-Seq) is the preferred approach to map histone modifications and identify cis-regulatory DNA elements throughout the genome. Multiple methods have been described to increase the efficiency of library preparation and to reduce hands-on time as well as costs. This review describes detailed steps to perform cell fixation, chromatin shearing, immunoprecipitation, and sequencing library preparation for a batch of 48-96 samples with small cell numbers. The protocol implements a semiautomated platform to reduce technical variability and improve signal-to-noise ratio as well as reduce hands-on time, thus allowing large-scale epigenetic studies of clinical samples with limited cell numbers.