What is it about?
All cells in your body have the same sequence of DNA and so have the same set of genes. But cells do very different things! What makes an eye different from a liver cell, or a brain cell different from a muscle cell? Although all types of cells have the same genes, different sets of genes are actually used in different cells. So some genes are turned off and some genes are turned on, but exactly which ones is different in a different type of cell. This process where genes are either turned on or turned off in a stable way in different types of cells is known as epigenetics. It works because different chemical marks, corresponding to “on” or “off” are added to the genes - extra information beyond the DNA sequence. As these marks are of a chemical nature, we wanted to know how they might affect the chemistry of the cell, which is called “metabolism” - it’s how the cell uses fuel to make everything that it needs in order to grow and perform its function. We discovered that some epigenetic pathways have really important consequences for the metabolism of the cell. In fact, some of these consequences even happen without any changes in how genes are turned on or off. This suggests that the changes in metabolism might even be another, separate, function of epigenetics.
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Why is it important?
We think that our work has shown how epigenetic changes are really important in controlling the chemistry of the cell (its metabolism). This adds an extra function to epigenetics as well as its better known role in controlling which genes are made by cells. Its very exciting, too, that the effects of epigenetics on metabolism are so different in healthy and cancerous cells. This will prompt further studies to understand why these differences arise and how they might be used to design new ways of treating cancer.
Perspectives
For me, this study forces a different perspective on epigenetics. While methylation of histones was known to interact with metabolism, many scientists have gotten used to seeing it as a sort of clean and digital process that primarily is about encoding information, whereas we offer a vision of histone methylation which is inherently embedded in the messy, analogue metabolic networks of the cell. It is a bit like an optical illusion, where the same image can be seen in different ways. Here we show a side of histone methylation where we see it more as a metabolic process in its own right.
Dr. Marcos Francisco Perez
Institute for Molecular Biology Barcelona (CSIC IBMB)
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Histone methyltransferase activity affects metabolism in human cells independently of transcriptional regulation, PLoS Biology, October 2023, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002354.
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