New discovery!

Epigenetic regulatory mechanisms, such as DNA methylation, histone modifications, and RNA-mediated targeting, regulate gene expression and underlie biological function

Recently, researchers from Tianjin Medical University published a research article entitled "CBX2 and EZH2 cooperatively promote the growth and metastasis of lung adenocarcinoma" in the journal Molecular Therapy: Nucleic Acids, which revealed that chromatin box protein 2 (CBX2) and histone lysine N-methyltransferase (EZH2) in promoting lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) progression, thus providing a potential target for the diagnosis and treatment of LUAD

In this study, to explore the potential functions of histone methylation regulators in LUAD, we performed differential expression analysis using RNA-seq data downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and found that CBX2 and EZH2 were significantly up-regulated of histone methylation regulators

Downregulation of the CBX2 gene significantly inhibited the growth and metastasis of LUAD cells

Mechanistically, we found that CBX2 and EZH2 downregulate PPAR signaling pathway genes and tumor suppressor genes by binding to the promoters of PPAR signaling pathway genes and tumor suppressor genes in concert or individually

In conclusion, through bioinformatics data mining and a series of in vitro and in vivo studies, we reveal the role of CBX2 in promoting growth and metastasis in LUAD, suggesting that CBX2 is a new potential therapeutic target

We further proposed a number of gene combinations as prognostic indicators for LUAD that performed well in the prognostic stratification of LUAD patients

references

Fei-Fei Hu et al.