A huge thanks to all co-authors, especially @annaknoer.bsky.social & Tebbe de Vries for the wonderful collaboration during our doctoral studies, and the dreamy combined supervision of Alexander Leitner & Ruedi Aebersold, who together helped (finally) bring this publication to fruition!

...a comprehensive suite of tools now exists, both for the lab and for data analysis, to enable #proteinRNA #XLMS for the masses!

Together with...
(1) Enhanced understanding of the UV-XL chemistry (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)
(2) Novel isotope labeling chemistry using commercially available reagents (pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...)
(3) A software tool to analyse such mass spectrometry data (pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...)
...

In this work, we:
- Demonstrate vastly improved sensitivity/coverage compared with the initial version of the protocol
- Empirically characterise for the first time the distance represented by UV-induced protein-RNA XLs
- Compare these properties between canonical and 4-thiouracil

Enter CLIR-MS - bringing well established cross-linking mass spectrometry principles from protein-protein interactions to protein-RNA interactions.

We still need experimental techniques to model protein-RNA interactions. Tools like #Alphafold might be pushing new boundaries in silico, but computational predictions always require careful validation in the lab.