Significance
This paper demonstrates the first time application of cellular fractionation to characterize cytosolic histone H1 by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Using the Ramos Burkitt's lymphoma cell line, cellular fractionation was shown to give less nuclear contamination and higher histone content than preparations by nuclei isolation. Further application of the cellular fractionation approach was shown by using primary chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells to monitor the movement of histone H1 across cellular compartments in response to the cyclin dependent kinase inhibitor flavopiridol. Collectively, these data establish a mass spectrometric method for exploration into the function of cytosolic histone H1.