The Regulatory Network on Acetylation of the Tumor Suppressor p53 / 中国生物化学与分子生物学报

ABSTRACT

p53 represents one of the most important tumor suppressors in mammalian cells, and the posttranslational modifications (PTMs) serve as a major strategy for fine-tuning of the functions of p53 in cells. Particularly, the acetylation regulates either the overall transactivity of p53 or the p53-dependent transcriptional selectivity, which plays key roles in modulating a variety of biological processes including cell cycle arrest, apoptosis, senescence, autophagy, and metabolism. This review, starting with the timeline of the researches on p53 acetylation, firstly summarizes how the site-specific acetylation of p53 is built up, including the acetyltransferases that catalyze p53 acetylation and their regulatory mechanism that influencing p53 functions. Secondly, this review summarizes pivotal deacetylases that erase p53 acetylation, and their contributions in modulating p53 cellular activities. Additionally, this review summarizes the reader proteins that specifically recognize and bind to acetylated/ unacetylated residues of p53, and their intimate interactions with p53 in manipulating downstream targets transcriptions. Meanwhile, this review sums up the crosstalk mechanisms between the acetylation and other PTMs in regulating p53 biological functions. Lastly, this review proposes a perspective on the studies of p53 acetylation in the field of molecular biomedicine in future.