Multiple challenges of CUT&Tag (Cassidee McDonough, Kyle Tanguay)

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Active Motif scientists Casidee McDonough from Epigenetic Services and Kyle Tanguay from R&D to talk about technical details of the CUT&Tag protocol and current developments around this method in our R&D Team.

CUT&Tag, which is short for Cleavage Under Targets and Tagmentation, is a molecular biology method that is used to investigate interactions between proteins and DNA and to identify DNA binding sites for their protein of interest. Although CUT&Tag is similar in some ways to ChIP assays, the starting material for CUT&Tag is live, permeabilized cells or isolated cell nuclei, rather than cells or tissue that have been crosslinked with formaldehyde as is the case when performing ChIP. The CUT&Tag method is very sensitive and has been reported to work with as few as 60 cells for some histone modifications. The ability to work with such small numbers of cells is an advantage for researchers working on specific cell types, such as rare neuronal populations, pancreatic islets, or stem cells that are difficult to obtain in large numbers.

In this Episode we discuss the CUT&Tag workflow in detail, talk about the challenges and pitfalls, give guidelines on how to do a good CUT&Tag experiment and offer a glimpse into the future of CUT&Tag product development at Active Motif.

References

• Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Using CUT&Tag Assays

• Library QC for ATAC-Seq and CUT&Tag | AKA “Does My Library Look Okay?”

• Kaya-Okur, H.S., Wu, S.J., Codomo, C.A. et al. CUT&Tag for efficient epigenomic profiling of small samples and single cells. Nat Commun 10, 1930 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09982-5

• Podcast: Chromatin Profiling: From ChIP to CUT&RUN, CUT&Tag and CUTAC (Steven Henikoff)

• CUT&Tag-validated antibodies

Contact

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• Email: podcast@activemotif.com