Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) using Drosophila tissue

Epigenetics remains a rapidly developing field that studies how the chromatin state contributes to differential gene expression in distinct cell types at different developmental stages. Epigenetic regulation contributes to a broad spectrum of biological processes, including cellular differentiation during embryonic development and homeostasis in adulthood. A critical strategy in epigenetic studies is to examine how various histone modifications and chromatin factors regulate gene expression. To address this, Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is used widely to obtain a snapshot of the association of particular factors with DNA in the cells of interest. ChIP technique commonly uses cultured cells as starting material, which can be obtained in abundance and homogeneity to generate reproducible data. However, there are several caveats: First, the environment to grow cells in Petri dish is different from that in vivo, thus may not reflect the endogenous chromatin state of cells in a living organism. Second, not all types of cells can be cultured ex vivo. There are only a limited number of cell lines, from which people can obtain enough material for ChIP assay. Here we describe a method to do ChIP experiment using Drosophila tissues. The starting material is dissected tissue from a living animal, thus can accurately reflect the endogenous chromatin state. The adaptability of this method with many different types of tissue will allow researchers to address a lot more biologically relevant questions regarding epigenetic regulation in vivo1, 2. Combining this method with high-throughput sequencing (ChIP-seq) will further allow researchers to obtain an epigenomic landscape.