Deep Sequencing of Small Chromatin-Associated RNA: Isolation and Library Preparation

Chromatin-associated RNA (caRNA) is a newly identified class of RNA molecules stably associated with chromatin, maintaining the higher order structure of euchromatic regions in an accessible form (Schubert et al., Mol Cell, doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2012.08.021, 2012). This section provides a detailed protocol describing the isolation of small caRNA from Drosophila cells and preparation of libraries suited for stranded small (20–200 bp) RNA deep sequencing on the Illumina platform.