Can we call a protein under undergone ChIP as ChIP'd protein? Is it formal?

Question

[Sukhi Singh]

More of a grammatical question, I am writing a report and was wondering, can we call a protein which was pulled down using ChIP (chromatin immunoprecipitation) as ChIP'd protein? I have seen some articles, tutorials and even papers using it.

Also, "pulling down/pulled down a protein" is it formal for writing purposes.

Have a good day!

Answer 1

[michael.law26]

I think you should say something like, "following crosslinking, immunoprecipitations were performed using antibodies that recognize xxx" in your Materials and Methods section. In the text, you could write the target proteins for each IP. To me, that's more formal than 'ChIP'd'

[Sukhi Singh]

yeah, I was just wandering, some papers have it in (but there are no rules seems). Thanks for the input.

Answer 2

[Ying W]

ChIP'd is not formal. If you cannot expect your audience to know what ChIP is, protein pull down is a more general term to use and you would probably need to define it first with something like "we pulled down DNA bound by protein X using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) followed by ...".

It is common to write "we performed ChIP with antibody against X to measure Y". Often times you just reference another paper in methods/protocol on how ChIP was performed. Make sure you include catalog number of antibody that you used.

[Sukhi Singh]

Thanks Ying, that's what I did exactly though I haven't mentioned the antibody details but I referred another lab member's thesis who carried out all the experiments and has detailed that.