A new histone modification "lactylation"

As you know, histone modifications such as acetylation and methylation are important in regulating gene expression.

In addition to methylation and acetylation, various histone modifications have been discovered in recent years, including serotolyration and glutarylation.

Here, the authors discovered a new modification called histone lactylation and explored its function.

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The authors first searched for novel histone modifications by MS.

As a result, they identified new histone modifications "lactylation" which use lactate as a substrate.

And they found that this histone lactylation promote gene expression by cell-free system.

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A very interesting aspect of this lactylation is that it uses lactate, a glycolytic metabolite, as a substrate.

Therefore, the authors further investigated for a relationship between intracellular metabolism and lactylation.

To this end they manupulated intracellular metabolism by chemical compounds.

As a result, they find that when glycolysis is dominant, the amount of lactate increases and the amount of histone lactylation also increases.

This suggest histone lactylation level may be affected by cellular metabolism.

They are also exploring functions in macrophages but I skipped detailed data.

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What's interesting and important is that histone lactylation may link intracellular metabolic and epigenetic states.

The axis from an intracellular metabolic state to the epigenetic state may also be true to the other system.

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Metabolic regulation of gene expression by histone lactylation, Nature, 2019
Di Zhang, Zhanyun Tang, ..., Bing Ren, Robert G. Roeder, Lev Becker & Yingming Zhao