ATAC-Me simultaneously decodes chromatin accessibility and DNA methylation

ATAC-Me probes chromatin accessibility and DNA methylation from a single DNA library and is a powerful method for identifying DNA methylation within accessible regions. Plant nuclei are extracted and incubated with Tn5 transposases that assemble methylated adapters. The accessible regions are tagged by the methylated adapters. The obtained DNA fragments are enriched and treated with sodium bisulfite to convert non-methylated cytosine to thymine. Since the methylated adapters are not converted by sodium bisulfite, these DNA fragments are readily amplified by specific sequencing primers during library construction. After sequencing, accessible regions and DNA methylation can be simultaneously identified by bioinformatics tools.