Two papers present approaches for direct identification of the co-occurrence of histone modifications and DNA methylation; the relationship between these marks is usually studied by correlative approaches. In both papers, the authors used chromatin immunoprecipitation to capture the fraction of the genome that is associated with the histone modification of interest — in this case, histone H3 lysine 27 trimethylation — and then performed bisulphite sequencing on the immunoprecipitated material to map DNA methylation at high resolution. This approach should be applicable to other histone marks.