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Updated: Oct 1, 2026

Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) to Assay Dynamic Histone Modification in Activated Gene Expression in Human Cells
Published on: July 29, 2010
Protocol for using heterologous spike-ins to normalize for technical variation in chromatin immunoprecipitation
Franziska Greulich1, Aikaterini Mechtidou2, Teresa Horn2
1Metabolic Programming, School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan, ZIEL-Institute for Food & Health, Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), 85354 Freising, Germany.
Abstract:
Quantifying differential genome occupancy by chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) remains challenging due to variation in chromatin fragmentation, immunoprecipitation efficiencies, and intertube variability. In this protocol, we add heterologous spike-ins from Drosophila chromatin as an internal control to the mice chromatin before immunoprecipitation to normalize for technical variation in ChIP-qPCR or ChIP-seq. The choice of spike-in depends on the evolutionary conservation of the protein of interest and the antibody used. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Greulich et al. (2021).
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