Probing histone modifications at a single-cell level in thousands of cells has been enabled by technologies such as single-cell CUT&Tag. Here we describe nano-CUT&Tag (nano-CT), which allows simultaneous mapping of up to three epigenomic modalities at single-cell resolution using nanobody-Tn5 fusion proteins. Multimodal nano-CT is compatible with starting materials as low as 25,000-200,000 cells and has significantly higher sensitivity and number of fragments per cell than single-cell CUT&Tag. We use nano-CT to simultaneously profile chromatin accessibility, H3K27ac, and H3K27me3 in juvenile mouse brain, allowing for discrimination of more cell types and states than unimodal single-cell CUT&Tag. We also infer chromatin velocity between assay for transposase-accessible chromatin (ATAC) and H3K27ac in the oligodendrocyte lineage and deconvolute H3K27me3 repressive states, finding two sequential waves of H3K27me3 repression at distinct gene modules during oligodendrocyte lineage progression. Given its high resolution, versatility, and multimodal features, nano-CT allows unique insights in epigenetic landscapes in complex biological systems at the single-cell level.

Chromatin states are functionally defined by a complex combination of histone modifications, transcription factor binding, DNA accessibility and other factors. Current methods for defining chromatin states cannot measure more than one aspect in a single experiment at single-cell resolution. Here we introduce nanobody-tethered transposition followed by sequencing (NTT-seq), an assay capable of measuring the genome-wide presence of up to three histone modifications and protein-DNA binding sites at single-cell resolution. NTT-seq uses recombinant Tn5 transposase fused to a set of secondary nanobodies (nb). Each nb-Tn5 fusion protein specifically binds to different immunoglobulin-G antibodies, enabling a mixture of primary antibodies binding different epitopes to be used in a single experiment. We apply bulk-cell and single-cell NTT-seq to generate high-resolution multimodal maps of chromatin states in cell culture and in human immune cells. We also extend NTT-seq to enable simultaneous profiling of cell surface protein expression and multimodal chromatin states to study cells of the immune system.