What is the purpose of chromatin immunoprecipitation?

Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is a variation of the basic immunoprecipitation technique. The basic steps in this technique are fixation, sonication, immunoprecipitation, and analysis of the immunoprecipitated DNA. Because the proteins are captured at the sites of their binding with DNA, ChIP helps to detect DNA-protein interactions that take place in living cells.

The goal of ChIP is to determine whether specific proteins are associated with specific genomic regions such as transcription factors on promoters or other DNA binding sites.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation is also used to determine the specific site in the genome that different histone modifications are associated with. This helps to identify the target of the histone modifiers.