Histone interaction landscapes visualized by crosslinking mass spectrometry in intact cell nuclei

Cells organize their actions partly through tightly controlled protein-protein interactions - collectively termed the interactome. Here we use crosslinking mass spectrometry (XL-MS) to chart the protein-protein interactions in intact human nuclei. We overall identified ~8700 crosslinks, of which 2/3 represent links connecting distinct proteins. From this data, we gain insights on interactions involving histone proteins. We observed that core histones on the nucleosomes expose well-defined interaction hot spots. For several nucleosome-interacting proteins, such as USF3 and Ran GTPase, the data allowed us to build low-resolution models of their binding mode to the nucleosome. For HMGN2 the data guided the construction of a refined model of the interaction with the nucleosome, based on complementary NMR, XL-MS and modeling. Excitingly, the analysis of crosslinks carrying post-translational modifications allowed us to extract how specific modifications influence nucleosome interactions. Overall, our data depository will support future structural and functional analysis of cell nuclei, including the nucleoprotein assemblies they harbor.