A simple method for improving the specificity of anti-methyl histone antibodies

Antibodies differentiating between the mono-, di- and trimethylated forms of specific histone lysine residues are a critical tool in epigenome research, but show variable specificity, potentially limiting comparisons across studies and between samples. Using trimethyl histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4me3)-a mark enriched at transcription start sites (TSS) of active genes-as an example, we describe how simple co-incubation with synthetic peptide of the K4me2 modification leads to increased specificity for K4me3 and a much sharper peak distribution proximal to TSS following chromatin immunoprecipitation and massively parallel sequencing (ChIP-Seq).