Take the chromosome confirmation capture or 3C sample and controls, and perform QPCR. Excise the product bands corresponding to the expected fragment size. To perform gel extraction of the PCR products, use a commercial kit or follow the homemade protocol.
For the latter, construct a homemade purification cartridge by poking a hole in the bottom of a 0.5 milliliter tube with a needle. Pack a small amount of cotton into the bottom of the tube with the hole, filling no more than half of the tube. Place the tube into a 1.5 milliliter tube, ensuring that the smaller tube rests on the lip of the bigger tube, and not in the tube.
Carefully cut the gel fragment into smaller pieces, and place it in the small tube of the cartridge. Place the assembly in a minus 20 degrees Celsius freezer for five minutes. Then, spin the assembly for three minutes at 13, 000 G and room temperature.
Discard the small tube containing the agoros debris, and keep the 1.5 milliliter tube with the extracted DNA in the buffer. The samples were tested for the presence of long range chromatin contacts between the different genomic loci, using combinations of loci-specific primers and QPCR. The product abundance is relative to a control primer set were calculated and graft for comparison.
The data indicated that 8 of the 10 reactions were conditional positives. Gel purification and sequencing of the expected PCR product for the eight conditional positives and one negative reaction were gel purified and sequenced. The results for representative positive and negative reactions are shown.
