Porvair’s Chromatrap Assays for Epigenetics

Porvair Sciences, the specialists in microplate products and assays has added a range of novel Chromatrap chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays to its epigenetics product portfolio.

The Chromatrap ChIP assay developed in association with University of Swansea is more efficient than conventional bead based method as the solid phase porous polymer functionalized with protein A in more efficient in capturing chromatin in Chromatrap. Also it uses spin column approach, offering significant advantage over the sepharose or magnetic beads. The levels of DNA pull down with Chromatrap is about 25 times more than conventional methods, and the signal to noise ratios for DNA enrichment is about 2 to 3 times better even with samples anywhere between 50ng to 3000ng chromatin per immunoprecipitation.

The chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) technique is used for studying the association of specific proteins or its modified isoforms with defined genomic regions. Matching antibodies are used to identify DNA protein complexes and the resulting fractions are treated to separate DNA and protein components and the DNA fragments of defined sequence are identified using different techniques.