Reconstitution of chromatin complexes from high-performance liquid chromatography-purified histones

We describe a method to reconstitute chromatin complexes from reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-purified histones. The complexes reconstituted in this way exhibit the same structural characteristics as their equivalent native counterparts. Furthermore, this method works independently of the acid- or salt-extracted origin of the histones used for the HPLC fractionation. The potential of this method for the reconstitution of chromatin particles consisting of sequence-defined DNA templates and well-defined histone variants and/or their posttranslationally modified isoforms is discussed.