Figure 2.

A schematic diagram of three chromatin assays. The blue cylinders represent the core histones, around which the DNA is wrapped. The pentagon represents a bound transcription factor (TF) which has displaced histones in a particular region; this region is described as ‘open chromatin’. The FAIRE assay enriches for such open chromatin regions by differential solubility in phenol. The DNaseI assay utilizes the fact that regions of the open chromatin are much more susceptible to DNaseI digestion. The ChIP assay uses a specific antibody to enrich for DNA regions binding to a specific transcription factor or a modified histone.