Not just proliferation, but drugs like thos inducing DNA damage can affect levels of some 'housekeeping' nuclear proteins.  The nuclear markers are better used as markers - to show your nuclear preparation is uncontaminated with cytoplasm or membrane, or vice-versa.  

b-actin is found both in nuclear and cytoplasmic fraction, as is tubulin.  So you can use them in either for a loading control.  You are better off keeping a portion of you cells to make a total extract for the sole purpose of protein loading control, and use the rest ofr fractionation.

These three links discuss the different controls for each compartment: (of course, one can find more!!)

http://www.abcam.com/primary-antibodies/loading-control-guide

http://www.labome.com/method/Loading-Controls-for-Western-Blots.html

http://blog.ptglab.com/index.php/western-blot-loading-controls/

http://www.cellsignal.com/products/primary-antibodies/5142

And on researchgate:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_best_internal_control_or_loading_control_for_both_cytoplasmic_and_nuclear_fractionwestern_blot

Good luck !!

PS: Please upvote if this has been helpful  !!! Thanks !   :-)

Not just proliferation, but drugs like thos inducing DNA damage can affect levels of some 'housekeeping' nuclear proteins.  The nuclear markers are better used as markers - to show your nuclear preparation is uncontaminated with cytoplasm or membrane, or vice-versa.  

b-actin is found both in nuclear and cytoplasmic fraction, as is tubulin.  So you can use them in either for a loading control.  You are better off keeping a portion of you cells to make a total extract for the sole purpose of protein loading control, and use the rest ofr fractionation.

These three links discuss the different controls for each compartment: (of course, one can find more!!)

http://www.abcam.com/primary-antibodies/loading-control-guide

http://www.labome.com/method/Loading-Controls-for-Western-Blots.html

http://blog.ptglab.com/index.php/western-blot-loading-controls/

http://www.cellsignal.com/products/primary-antibodies/5142

And on researchgate:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_best_internal_control_or_loading_control_for_both_cytoplasmic_and_nuclear_fractionwestern_blot

Good luck !!

PS: Please upvote if this has been helpful  !!! Thanks !   :-)

Hi,

Histones H3 or H1, or TATA binding protein (TBP) would be alternatives.

A recent paper in Science Signaling (KA Janes, 2015) looked at parameters that affect WB quantification, including choice of loading control for normalization. The study indicates that a single loading control is not the best choice. Multi-protein normalization yields the most reproducible results (3 or more loading controls multiplexed on each blot, spanning a range of protein abundance). 

From the paper: "A common approach found in the literature is to normalize by only one loading control, but this scaling is highly problematic. Taking one unknown quantity (the protein of interest) and dividing it by another unknown quantity (a single loading control) creates a number with very poor statistical properties, including an undefined mean. The dangers of single variable normalization have long been recognized in data from microarrays (23) and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (24), but not in data from immunoblotting. A solution is to aggregate the band intensities from multiple loading controls, calculating a mean estimate of total cellular content that is less sensitive to the technical or biological fluctuations of a single loading control (12, 25)." [emphasis mine]

An eye-opening and informative paper. It outlines straightforward diagnostic experiments that any lab can use to assess immunoblotting accuracy and precision.

http://stke.sciencemag.org/content/8/371/rs2.abstract