Fasting alters histone methylation in paraventricular nucleus through regulating of polycomb repressive complex 2

The developing brain is highly sensitive to environmental influences. Unfavorable nutrition is one kind of stress that can cause acute metabolic disorders during the neonatal period [1,2,3] and severe diseases in later life [4,5]. These early life experiences occurring during heightened periods of brain plasticity help determine the lifelong structural and functional aspects of brain and behavior. In humans, for example, weight gain during the first week of life increased the propensity for developing obesity several decades later [5]. This susceptibility is, if not all, related to the dynamic reversible epigenetic imprints left on the histones [6,7,8], especially during the prenatal and postpartum period [9]. Histones are highly dynamic and responsive towards environmental stress [10,11]. Through covalent modification of the histone tail, histones are able to direct DNA scaffolding and regulate gene expression [10,12]. Thus far, various types of post translational modifications have been identified on various histones tails [12]. Among them, the methylation and acetylation on lysine residue (K) 27 on histone 3 (H3) has been tightly linked to gene repression [13,14] and activation [15], respectively. EZh2 (enhancer of zeste 2) in the polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) is the only methyltransferase that has been linked to catalyze this methylation reaction. In addition, SUZ (suppressor of zeste) and EED (embryonic ectoderm development) are two other key proteins in PRC2 function core that help EZH2. As previous reported, increased H3K27 methylation was monitored after fasting stress during neonatal period in chicks' paraventricular nucleus (PVN). In this study, we investigated the detailed mechanism behind changes in H3K27 methylation following fasting stress. After 24 hours fasting on 3 days-of-age (D3), chicks exhibited elevated mRNA levels of PRC2 key components, including EZH2, SUZ and EED, in the PVN on D4. Western blots confirmed this finding by showing increased global methylation status at the H3K27 site in the PVN on D4. In addition, until 38 days post fasting, SUZ and EZH2 remained inhibited. A newly identified anorexigenic factor, Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), was used as an example of multiple hormones expressed in PVN to verify this finding. Both BDNF protein and mRNA exhibited compatible changes to global changes of tri(me3) and di-methylated (me2) H327. Furthermore, by using chromatin immunoprecipitation assays (ChIP), we were able to monitor the changes of H3K27me2/me3 deposition along the Bdnf gene. Fasting significantly increased H3K27me2/me3 as well as EZH2 at the Bdnf’s promoter, transcription start site and 3'-untranslated region. These data show that fasting stress during the early life period could leave epigenetic imprinting in PVN for a long time. Next, we tried to understand the function of this epigenetic imprinting in the chicks' PVN. Thus, we compared naive chicks (never fasted) to chicks that received either a single 24 hour fast on D3 or two 24 hour fast on both D3 and 10 days-of-age (D10). We found that