A nuclear rna-protein complex that plays a role in rna processing. In the nucleoplasm, the U2 snRNP along with other small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (U1, U4-U6, and U5) assemble into spliceosomes that remove introns from pre-mRNA by splicing. The U2 snRNA forms base pairs with conserved sequence motifs at the branch point, which associates with a heat- and RNAase-sensitive factor in an early step of splicing.