8D). Sirtuins posttranscriptionally modulate the function of many cellular proteins that undergo reversible acetylation-deacetylation cycles, affecting physiological responses that have implications for treating diseases of aging.17 Emerging research into sirtuins show their wider role to selleckchem influence regulatory molecules and pathways in complex manners. A recent breakthrough

in SIRT7 research showed that SIRT7 activates RNA polymerase I transcription and deacetylates p53.5 Sirt7-knockout mice have been developed and found to have shorter lifespans with enhanced inflammatory cardiomyopathy.10 SIRT7 is a nuclear protein that is associated with active rDNA and interacts with RNA polymerase I. SIRT7 overexpression increase rDNA transcription, whereas its down-regulation causes the opposite effect.5 The rDNA transcription is one of the essential cellular processes, which contains ribosome biogenesis and translation that are governed at numerous levels in cancer progression. An overexpression of SIRT7 has been detected in thyroid and breast cancers,7,

8 and its levels are related to tumor progression. PLX-4720 mw However, no underlying mechanisms for enhanced SIRT7 expression and the consequences of its aberrant regulation have been suggested in these malignancies. In addition, although SIRT7 is abundant in metabolically active tissues,9 no detailed analysis of biological roles of SIRT7 in liver malignancy, such as HCC, has been conducted to date. In a previous study, we examined large-scale gene expression changes between histopathological grades in human HCCs.13 Based on these microarray data, we noted that SIRT7 expression was gradually increased from precancer to overt cancer, and we confirmed its up-regulation in

an additional subset of human HCCs and in various liver cancer cell lines (Fig. 1; Supporting Fig. 1). These results led us to speculate that SIRT7 plays a role in HCC tumorigenesis. Subsequently, we found that SIRT7 inactivation selectively induced p21WAF1/Cip1 上海皓元医药股份有限公司 expression and concomitantly suppressed cyclin D1 expression in HCC cells (Fig. 2A,B; Supporting Fig. 2A,B). It is not clear whether SIRT7 overexpression leads to the epigenetic suppression of p21WAF1/Cip1 per se or if other processes also mediate this phenomenon; nonetheless, the present study demonstrates for the first time that SIRT7 can modulate the expression of cell cycle proteins, p21WAF1/CIP1 and cyclin D1. This cooperative suppression of p21WAF1/Cip1 and induction of cyclin D1 expression by SIRT7 may exert a very potent mitotic stimulation causing uncontrolled cell growth during HCC progression. Furthermore, we found that SIRT7 inactivation suppressed ectopic protein expression, thus implying a role in the protein synthesis machinery during HCC tumorigenesis (Fig. 2E).