Tara’s paper on differential interactome analysis published in MCP

PhD student Tara Bartolec has just had a new paper published in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. The paper, titled “Differential proteome and interactome analysis reveal the basis of pleiotropy associated with the histidine methyltransferase Hpm1p” is one of just a few studies that have used crosslinking mass spectrometry to compare protein-protein interactions, and aspects of protein structure, at scale between two sample types. Studying the effect of knocking out ribosomal methyltransferase Hpm1, which most likely just methylates one histidine on ribosomal protein Rpl3, the paper shows that some but not all knockout phenotypes could be explained by changes in protein expression. However, other phenotypes could be explained and are likely to arise from changes in either protein-protein interactions or changes in protein structure that could be detected by crosslinking mass spectrometry. Heavy isotope labelling was used to help detect differences. The study is one of just a few to show that some phenotypes arise from changes in protein-protein interactions and not protein expression, and that these can be detected via advanced proteomic techniques.