Abstract
Transcription regulation emerged to be one of the key mechanisms in regulating autophagy. Inhibitors of H3K9 methylation activates the expression of LC3B, as well as other autophagy-related genes, and promotes autophagy process. However, the detailed mechanisms of autophagy regulated by nuclear factors remain elusive. In this study, we performed a drug screen of SMYD2-/- cells and discovered that SMYD2 deficiency enhanced the cell death induced by BIX01294, an inhibitor of histone H3K9 methylation. BIX-01294 induces accumulation of LC3 II and autophagy-related cell death, but not caspase-dependent apoptosis. We profiled the global gene expression pattern after treatment with BIX-01294, in comparison with rapamycin. BIX-01294 selectively activates the downstream genes of p53 signaling, such as p21 and DOR, but not PUMA, a typical p53 target gene inducing apoptosis. BIX-01294 also induces other autophagy-related genes, such as ATG4A and ATG9A. SMYD2 is a methyltransferase for p53 and regulates its transcription activity. Its deficiency enhances the BIX-01294-induced autophagy-related cell death through transcriptionally promoting the expression of p53 target genes. Taken together, our data suggest BIX-01294 induces autophagy-related cell death and selectively activates p53 target genes, which is repressed by SMYD2 methyltransferase.
Highlights
Protein methylation on histones is initially well demonstrated in transcription regulation and chromatin structure [1, 2]
By utilizing generation sequencing, we found that BIX-01294 altered the transcription of genes involved in ribosome, metabolisms and p53 signaling, as well as several autophagyrelated genes, including LC3B, ATG4A, ATG9A, TP53INP2/DOR and TP53INP1
Rapamycin, a classical autophagy inducer does not regulate the transcription of known genes directly involved in autophagy
Summary
Protein methylation on histones is initially well demonstrated in transcription regulation and chromatin structure [1, 2]. Methylation on non-histone proteins is proved to be one of the key steps in regulating protein functions [3]. The protein methyltransferase family of SET and MYND domain containing proteins is of important functions in tumorigenesis and development processes [4]. These proteins contain an atypical SET domain, which is split into two parts by one MYND domain [4]. SMYD proteins exert their function by methylating. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0116782 January 6, 2015
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