In the past decade important progress has been made in our understanding of the epigenetic regulatory machinery. It has become clear that genetic aberrations in multiple epigenetic modifier proteins are associated with various types of cancer. Moreover, targeting the epigenome has emerged as a novel tool to treat cancer patients. Recently, the first drugs have been reported that specifically ta...

The reversible post-translational modifier, SUMO (small ubiquitin-related modifier), modulates the activity of a diverse set of target proteins, resulting in important consequences to the cellular machinery. Conjugation machinery charges the processed SUMO so that it can be linked via an isopeptide bond to a target protein. The removal of SUMO moieties from conjugated proteins by isopeptidases ...

Epigenetic alterations, including DNA acetylation, hypermethylation and hypomethylation, and the associated transcriptional changes of the affected genes are central to the evolution and progression of various human cancers, including pancreatic cancer. Cancer-associated epigenetic alterations are attractive therapeutic targets because such epigenetic alterations, unlike genetic changes, are po...

Epigenetic regulation of gene expression is a process driven by dynamic changes in chromatin architecture carried out by histone-modifying enzymes. In eukaryotic organisms, chromatin organization allows tight packaging of the genomewhile still allowing access to transcriptional machinery. The basic unit of chromatin is the nucleosome, which consists of DNA wrapped around an octamer of histone p...

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are enzymes that catalyze the removal of acetyl functional groups from the lysine residues of both histone and nonhistone proteins. In humans, there are 18 HDAC enzymes that use either zinc- or NAD(+)-dependent mechanisms to deacetylate acetyl lysine substrates. Although removal of histone acetyl epigenetic modification by HDACs regulates chromatin structure and tra...