Congratulation to Feng-Yin for her paper

The research group in Professor Hui Zhang’s laboratory at the School of Chemical Biology and Biotechnology, SZPKU, has recently published a research article entitled “LSD1 Regulates Pluripotency of Embryonic Stem/Carcinoma Cells through HDAC1-mediated Deacetylation of Histone H4 at Lysine 16” in the international journal Molecular and Cellular Biology on November 4, 2013. In this article, the researchers from Zhang’s laboratory found that the novel LSD1 inhibitors that specifically target cancer cells with pluripotent stem cell properties in fact act through the histone deacetylase 1 (HDAC1) to inhibit the growth of cancer stem cells. HDAC1 coordinates with LSD1 to regulate the deacetylation of the lysine 16 in histone H4 (H4K16) and the methylation of lysine 4 in histone H3 (H3K4), both are required for the self-renewal and proliferation of pluripotent embryonic stem cells and embryonic carcinoma cells. Although HDAC inhibitors have been used in clinical trials as potential anti-cancer chemicals, most of these inhibitors are non-specific for cancer cells. The findings from Zhang’s laboratory revealed that LSD1 and HDAC1 inhibitors can be used to specifically target cancer stem cells for growth inhibition without affecting the proliferation of normal cells. These discoveries provide novel insights into the mechanism by which cancer stem cells is epigenetically regulated by histone modifications and shed new lights on how to use epigenetic inhibitors to specifically target cancer stem cell for cancer therapy.