Histone acetyltransferase PCAF Up-regulated cell apoptosis in hepatocellular carcinoma via acetylating histone H4 and inactivating AKT signaling

Molecular Cancer

Research

Xin Zheng¹  Xiaohong Gai¹  Qingguang Liu¹  Feihu Ding¹  Yingmin Yao¹  Kangsheng Tu¹  Zhongtang Lu¹ 

[1] Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, 277 Yanta West Road, 710061, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China;

关键词: PCAF;    Hepatocellular carcinoma;    AKT signaling;    Histone H4;    Apoptosis;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1476-4598-12-96

 received in 2013-05-17, accepted in 2013-08-20,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPCAF is an important intrinsic histone acetyltransferases. This study tried to establish the effect of PCAF on HCC cell apoptosis.MethodBoth in vitro and in vivo experiments including IHC, DAPI staining, caspase 3/7 activity assay, BrdU assay, MTT assay, western immunoblotting and co-immunoprecipitation were used here.ResultsPCAF was found to be expressed at the low level in most of HCC cell lines. PCAF overexpression induced cell apoptosis and growth arrest with increased Histone H4 acetylation and inactivation of AKT signaling in Huh7 and HepG2 cells. The opposite results were obtained by silencing PCAF in Hep3B cells. The co-immunoprecipitation assay confirmed that PCAF protein was bound with histone H4 protein in the nucleus of Hep3B cells. Finally, the in vivo experiment confirmed the findings mentioned-above.ConclusionThese data identified PCAF promotes cell apoptosis and functions as a HCC repressor through acetylating histone H4 and inactivating AKT signaling.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zheng et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.