Targeted Profiling of Epitranscriptomic Reader, Writer and Eraser Proteins Regulated by H3K36me3

Trimethylation of lysine 36 on histone H3 (H3K36me3), an epigenetic mark associated with actively transcribed genes, plays an important role in multiple cellular processes, including transcription elongation, DNA methylation, DNA repair, and RNA m6A methylation, etc. Aberrant expression and mutations of the main methyltransferase for H3K36me3, i.e., SET domain-containing 2 (SETD2), were shown to be associated with various cancers. Here, we performed targeted profiling of 154 epitranscriptomic RWE proteins using a scheduled liquid chromatography-parallel-reaction monitoring (LC-PRM) method coupled with the use of stable isotope-labeled (SIL) peptides as internal standards to investigate how H3K36me3 modulates the chromatin occupancies of epitranscriptomic reader, writer, and eraser (RWE) proteins. Our results showed consistent changes in chromatin occupancies of RWE proteins upon losses of H3K36me3 and H4K16ac, and a role of H3K36me3 in recruiting METTL3 to chromatin upon DNA double strand break induction. In addition, protein-protein interaction network and Kaplan-Meier survival analyses revealed the importance of METTL14 and TRMT11 in kidney cancer. Taken together, our work revealed cross-talks between H3K36me3 and epitranscriptomic RWE proteins and uncovered potential roles of these RWE proteins in H3K36me3-mediated biological processes.