Effects of histone modifications on cell proliferation

Exposure of normal liver cell with a viral or chemical agent triggers telomere shortening associated with repetitive necrosis/proliferation rotation. It causes changes in microenvironment of liver, activation of stem cells and/or satellite cells, after that, activation of cirrhosis, displastic nodule and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) depending on the aberrant cell division and resistance to apoptosis. It was demonstrated that during hepatocarcinogenesis most of genes silenced by methylation on their promoter, even though the roles of histone code alterations have not been known yet.In this study, it was basically investigated changes of histone methylation patterns, known as helper on the activation and/or silencing transcription in literature, under the effect of lithium treatment in a HCC cell line, HuH7. Accordingly, it was observed that G1 arrest occured in cells treated with lithium and it was detected upregulation of H3K4me3, H3K9me3, H3K27me3 and H3K36me1 modifications. Furthermore, in contrast to EZH2 methyl transferase that catalyses trimethylation of H3 on Lys27 downregulate on transcriptional and protein level, unexpectedly H3K27me3 the modification of which this enzyme responsible for is increases. This result makes us thinking lithium affects by a different mechanism. It was known that from the literature knowledge lithium is inhibits kinases like GSK3B and Akt, hypotesized us that kinases inhibits EZH2 by phosphorylation. To test this hypothesis, we demonstrated that according to lithium affect phophorylated EZH2 decreases on 2. and 6. hours.As a conclusion, these analyses showed us the alterations of histone modification patterns, especially H3K27me3 modification, might affect cell proliferation on HCC cell line. This is important to offer new opportunities for addressing the potential role of histone code in HCC treatment.