Butyrate mediates decrease of histone acetylation centered on transcription start sites and down-regulation of associated genes.

ABSTRACT: Butyrate is a histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi) with anti-neoplastic properties, which theoretically reactivates epigenetically silenced genes by increasing global histone acetylation. However, recent studies indicate that a similar number or even more genes are down-regulated than up-regulated by this drug. We treated hepatocarcinoma HepG2 cells with butyrate and characterized the levels of acetylation at DNA-bound histones H3 and H4 by ChIP-chip along the ENCODE regions. In contrast to the global increases of histone acetylation, many genomic regions close to transcription start sites were deacetylated after butyrate exposure. In order to validate these findings, we found that both butyrate and trichostatin A treatment resulted in histone deacetylation at selected regions, while nucl

SUBMITTER: Rada-Iglesias A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1891332 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature