Can I add artificial DNA to Library?

[muxingu]

My apology if it has been asked already. Basically I'd like to know whether it's valid to add some artificial DNA to my samples as benchmarks before sequencing (illumina)?

The reason is that my treatment cell has much higher histone (h2a.z) amount than the control cell almost everywhere in chromatin, say two times higher. If I just sequence them without benchmark, then after normalization, the chip-seq signals for treatment and control will be the same at most loci, even though the actual histone amount is two times higher. That's why I'm thinking of putting in some DNA of known amount.

I'm not quite familiar with how sequencing works. Please let me know if you have done this before, or if there is any similar protocols. I really appreciate any answers.

Thanks a million

Mux

[krobison]

Simple answer is yes; spiking in phiX (phage) genome is standard in Illumina sequencing, and spiking in other standards is used by some groups (posters at AGBT13).

[muxingu]

Thank you very much Krobison. This is exactly what I'm looking for.