RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 PhoX – an IMAC-enrichable Crosslinking Reagent JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 556688 DO 10.1101/556688 A1 Steigenberger, Barbara A. A1 Pieters, Roland J. A1 Heck, Albert J.R. A1 Scheltema, Richard A. YR 2019 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/02/21/556688.abstract AB Chemical crosslinking mass spectrometry is rapidly emerging as a prominent technique to study protein structures. Structural information is obtained by covalently connecting peptides in close proximity by small reagents and identifying the resulting peptide pairs by mass spectrometry. However, sub-stoichiometric reaction efficiencies render routine detection of crosslinked peptides problematic. Here we present a new tri-functional crosslinking reagent, termed PhoX, which is decorated with a stable phosphonic acid handle. This makes the crosslinked peptides amenable to the well-established IMAC enrichment. The handle allows for 300x enrichment efficiency and 97% specificity, dramatically reducing measurement time and improving data quality. We exemplify the approach on various model proteins and protein complexes, e.g. resulting in a structural model of the LRP1/RAP complex. PhoX is also applicable to whole cell lysates. When focusing the database search on ribosomal proteins, our first attempt resulted in 355 crosslinks, out-performing current efforts in less measurement time.