NEW YORK – AtlasXomics and EpiCypher said on Tuesday that they have inked a partnership to further develop the Cleavage Under Targets and Tagmentation (CUT&Tag) assay for spatial epigenomics applications.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
According to the companies, the assays will be developed on AtlasXomics' Deterministic Barcoding in Tissue for Spatial Omics Sequencing (DBiT-seq) platform using CUT&Tag reagents and antibodies from EpiCypher, enabling the profiling of histone post-translational modifications (PTMs), transcription factors, and other chromatin regulators.
Originally developed by Steven Henikoff's lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, CUT&Tag is a chromatin mapping assay that uses a fusion of Tn5 transposase, protein A, and protein G (pAG-Tn5) to cleave and add sequencing adapters at antibody-bound chromatin. The technology was later licensed and commercialized by Durham, North Carolina-based EpiCypher.
Meanwhile, DBiT-seq, which was invented by Rong Fan's lab at Yale University and relies on a combination of microfluidics and next-generation sequencing for high-resolution spatial profiling in tissues, has been commercialized by Yale spinout AtlasXomics for spatial ATAC-seq assays to map chromatin accessibility.
AtlasXomics and EpiCypher said they will focus their initial development efforts on fresh-frozen samples, with the long-term goal of optimizing the assay for formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples for clinical applications.