Coupling Exonuclease Digestion with Selective Chemical Labeling for Base-resolution Mapping of 5-Hydroxymethylcytosine in Genomic DNA

Abstract

This protocol is designed to obtain base-resolution information on the level of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) in CpGs without the need for bisulfite modification. It relies on (i) the capture of hydroxymethylated sequences by a procedure known as ‘selective chemical labeling’ (see Szulwach et al., 2012) and (ii) the digestion of the captured DNA by exonucleases. After Illumina sequencing of the digested DNA fragments, an ad hoc bioinformatic pipeline extracts the information for further downstream analysis.