Probing chromatin modifications in response to ERK signaling

Abstract

Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is a technique used to determine the association of proteins or histone modifi cations with chromatin regions in living cells or tissues, and is used extensively in the chromatin biology field to study transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms. Increasing evidence points to an epigenetic coordination of signaling cascades, such as ERK, that regulate key processes in development and disease, revealing novel principles of gene regulation. Here we describe a detailed protocol for performing chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by qPCR (ChIP-qPCR) for probing histone modifi cations regulated by ERK signaling in mouse ESCs.