A few best practices for ATAC-seq assays are suggested as follows:
- Digest away background DNA (medium/dead cells) using DNase I22
- Use fresh/cyropreserved cells/tissues to isolate nuclei7,9
- Reduce mitochondrial/chloroplast DNA contamination as much as possible by using the Omni-ATAC protocol or other methods22–25
- Optimize the ratio of the amount of Tn5 enzyme to the number of nuclei
- Optimize the number of PCR cycles19
- Perform Paired-end (PE) sequencing, e.g., 2 x 50 to 100 bp
- Sequence > 50 M PE reads (~200 M for footprinting analysis)7
A few best practices for ATAC-seq data analysis are suggested as follows:
- Perform raw read QC using FASTQC before alignment
- Perform post-alignment QC using ATACSeqQC10
- Perform peak calling using a peak caller, such as MACS226 in narrowdPeak mode with option settings: “shift -s and extend 2s”, Genrich, or HMMRATAC.27
- Perform post-peak calling QC
- Annotate peaks and generate peak distribution among genomic features using ChIPpeakAnno28
- Obtain functions of genes associated to peaks using the Genomic Regions Enrichment of Annotations Tool (GREAT)29
- Annotate peaks and generate peak distribution among genomic features using ChIPpeakAnno28
Copied From: https://haibol2016.github.io/ATACseqQCWorkshop/articles/ATACseqQC_workshop.html