Reporter assay using the beta-galactosidase (lacZ) gene. The lacZ gene is typically fused to the promoter of interest. Differential regulation of the promoter mediated by the TF is assessed by induction of the system and evaluation of lacZ expression. Bacteria expressing lacZ appear blue when grown on a X-gal medium. The assay is often performed using a plasmid borne construction on a lacZ(def) strain.

ChIP-Seq is equivalent to ChIP-chip down to the last step. In ChIP-Seq, immunoprecipiated DNA fragments are prepared for sequencing and funneled into a massively parallel sequencer that produces short reads. Even though the sonication step is the same as in ChIP-chip, ChIP-Seq will generate multiple short-reads within any given 500 bp region, thereby pinning down the location of TFBS to within 50-100 bp. A similar result can be obtained with ChIP-chip using high-density tiling-arrays. The downside of ChIP-Seq is that sensitivity is proportional to cost, as sensitivity increases with the number of (expensive) parallel sequencing runs. To control for biases, ChIP-seq experiments often use the "input" as a control. This is DNA sequence resulting from the same pipeline as the ChIP-seq experiment, but omitting the immunoprecipitation step. It therefore should have the same accessibility and sequencing biases as the experiment data.

Quantitative Reverse-Transcription PCR is a modification of PCR in which RNA is first reverse transcribed into cDNA and this is amplified measuring the product (qPCR) in real time. It therefore allows one to analyze transcription by directly measuring the product (RNA) of a gene's transcription. If the gene is transcribed more, the starting product for PCR is larger and the corresponding volume of amplification is also larger.