On September 14th 2017, Prof. Zhou Dao-Xiu’s team in rice group,  National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, Huazhong Agricultural University, published their the latest research findings entitled "Rice NAD⁺-dependent histone deacetylase OsSRT1 represses glycolysis and regulates the moonlighting function of GAPDH as a transcriptional activator of glycolytic genes" in the journal  "Nucleic Acids Research". This study revealed that rice histone deacetylase OsSRT1 regulate 3- phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) by deacetylation. GAPDH, a key enzyme, is directly involved in activation of glycolysis pathways. This is first time that the relationship between epigenetic regulation and energy metabolism have been reported in crops.

Being photosynthetic organisms, plants are autotrophic and there are significant differences in primary carbon and energy metabolisms and in metabolic and signaling pathways. Although a few reports suggest that OsSRT1 is directly involved in some metabolism gene regulation in both seedling growth and seed development, it remains largely unknown whether and how Os-SRT1 regulate energy and metabolic flux in plant cells.

In this paper, Zhou’s team show that OsSRT1 represses glycolysis by mediating deacetylation of both histone and the glycolytic GAPDH that is found in this work to also function as an activator of glycolytic gene expression. OsGAPDH1 is enriched on the promoter of several glycolytic genes and activates their expression. OsSRT1-mediated lysine deacetylation of GAPDH inhibits its nuclear accumulation and transactivation. The results suggest that OsSRT1 may regulate carbon metabolic flux by coordinating primary metabolism and gene expression for plant to adapt to the changing environmental conditions.

The first author is Dr. Hua Zhang, a PhD student at the school of life science and technology, and Professor Dao-Xiu Zhou, who is the correspondent author. Professor Yu Zhao is also the co-author of the paper. The research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [31730049]; National Key Research and Development Program of China [2016YFD0100802]; 111 project [B07041]; Huazhong Agricultural University Scientific & Technological Self-innovation Foundation [2016RC003]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2662015PY228]