Characterisation of FAK- and ILK-dependent nuclear subproteomes

In addition to central functions in cell adhesion signalling, integrin-associated proteins have wider roles at sites distal to adhesion receptors. In experimentally defined adhesomes, there is clear enrichment of proteins that localise to the nucleus, and conversely, we now report that nuclear proteomes contain a subset of adhesome components that localise to the nucleus of cancer cells. We have defined a nucleo-adhesome, providing evidence for the remarkable scale of nuclear localisation of adhesion proteins, establishing a framework for interrogating nuclear adhesion protein functions. Here, we examined whether there was a role for focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and integrin-linked kinase (ILK) in specifying the nucleo-adhesome and, more broadly, the nuclear proteome in squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) cancer cells.