MS_HistoneDB, a manually curated resource for proteomic analysis of human and mouse histones

Histones and histone variants are essential components of the nuclear chromatin. While mass spectrometry has opened a large window to their characterization and functional studies, their identification from proteomic data remains challenging. Indeed, the current interpretation of mass spectrometry data relies on public databases which are either not exhaustive (Swiss-Prot) or contain many redundant entries (UniProtKB or NCBI). Currently, no protein database is ideally suited for the analysis of histones and the complex array of mammalian histone variants. Here, we propose two proteomics-oriented manually curated databases for mouse and human histone variants. Several histone variants, which had so far only been inferred by homology or detected at the RNA level, were detected by mass spectrometry, confirming the existence of their protein form.