Folate deficiency affects histone methylation

Abstract Formaldehyde is extremely toxic reacting with proteins to crosslinks peptide chains. Formaldehyde is a metabolic product in many enzymatic reactions and the question of how these enzymes are protected from the formaldehyde that is generated has largely remained unanswered. Early experiments from our laboratory showed that two liver mitochondrial enzymes, dimethylglycine dehydrogenase (DMGDH) and sarcosine dehydrogenase (SDH) catalyze oxidative demethylation reactions (sarcosine is a common name for monomethylglycine). The enzymatic products of these enzymes were the demethylated substrates and formaldehyde, produced from the removed methyl group. Both DMGDH and SDH contain FAD and both have tightly bound tetrahydrofolate (THF), a folate coenzyme. THF binds reversibly with formaldehyde to form 5,10-methylene-THF. At that time we showed that purified DMGDH, with tightly bound THF, reacted with formaldehyde generated during the reaction to form 5,10-methylene-THF. This effectively scavenged the formaldehyde to protect the enzyme. Recently, post-translational modifications on histone tails have been shown to be responsible for epigenetic regulation of gene expression. One of these modifications is methylation of lysine residues. The first enzyme discovered to accomplish demethylation of these modified histones was histone lysine demethylase (LSD1). LSD1 specifically removes methyl groups from di- and mono-methylated lysines at position 4 of histone 3. This enzyme contained tightly bound FAD and the products of the reaction were the demethylated lysine residue and formaldehyde. The mechanism of LSD1 demethylation is analogous to the mechanism previously postulated for DMGDH, i.e. oxidation of the N-methyl bond to the methylene imine followed by hydrolysis to generate formaldehyde. This suggested that THF might also be involved in the LSD1 reaction to scavenge the formaldehyde produced. Our hypotheses are that THF is bound to native LSD1 by analogy to DMGDH and SDH and that the bound THF serves to protect the FAD class of histone demethylases from the destructive effects of formaldehyde generation by formation of 5,10-methylene-THF. We present pilot data showing that decreased folate in livers as a result of dietary folate deficiency is associated with increased levels of methylated lysine 4 of histone 3. This can be a result of decreased LSD1 activity resulting from the decreased folate available to scavenge the formaldehyde produced at the active site caused by the folate deficiency. Because LSD1 can regulate gene expression this suggests that folate may play a more important role than simply serving as a carrier of one-carbon units and be a factor in other diseases associated with low folate.