Recently, Professor Xu Qiutao's team from the School of Agriculture of Guangxi University (GXU) has made new progress in the research on the functions of new histone modifications in plants. This study drafted for the first time the whole genome map of a new acylation modification at specific sites of rice histones - 2-hydroxyisobutyrylation (H4K8hib). It revealed that H4K8hib, as an activating chromatin mark, regulates rice disease resistance by promoting gene expression. The related results were published in the internationally renowned botanical journal Molecular Plant under the title “Histone H4K8hib modification promotes gene expression and regulates rice immunity”. Guangxi University is the first complete unit of the paper. Professor Xu Qiutao of GXU and Ma Xuan, a doctoral student at the School of Agriculture of Ningxia University, are the co-first authors, and Professor Chen Xiaoyang of the School of Plant Protection of Anhui Agricultural University and Xu Qiutao are the co-corresponding authors.

Histone modifications play key roles in cellular processes such as transcriptional regulation and DNA replication. Currently, histone methylation and acetylation have been studied by many researchers. In recent years, with the rapid development of proteomics mass spectrometry technology, new acylation modifications such as crotonylation, 2-hydroxyisobutyrylation, and lactylation have been successively identified. However, in plants, the functions of most novel acylation modifications are still poorly understood, especially the acylation modifications at specific histone sites and the biological processes they regulate, which still lacks in-depth research. In response to this research gap, the research team used rice as an object to systematically study the functional mechanism of H4K8hib modification. The study found that this modification is positively correlated with gene expression and is an activating epigenetic mark. For the first time, the histone deacetylase HDA705 was identified as the key enzyme to remove H4K8hib modification, and it was revealed that the deletion of HDA705 can significantly promote the H4K8hib modification level of disease resistance genes and activate the expression of defense genes, thereby enhancing the disease resistance of rice.

This study combines the dynamic regulation of histone H4K8hib with the plant biological stress response mechanism, providing important inspiration for analyzing the regulatory network of plant histone modification and its role in plant immunity, expanding the research field of plant epigenetic modification, and providing theoretical support for the molecular breeding of disease-resistant crops. It not only deepens the understanding of the biological functions of new acylation modifications but also provides important theoretical support and potential molecular targets for improving the efficiency of rice disease resistance breeding. At the same time, this study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the High-level Talent Program of Guangxi University. Professor Zhang Jisen from the School of Agriculture of GXU, Professor Huang Junbin, Professor Chen Xiaolin, Associate Professor Zheng Lu, and doctoral student Chen Zhengting from Huazhong Agricultural University participated in this research.

It is reported that in recent years, Professor Xu Qiutao's team has focused on the functional mechanism of epigenetic regulation, a hot topic in plant biology, and the research work focuses on the mutual regulation relationship between energy metabolism and epigenetic modification. A series of important original results have been published in well-known domestic and foreign journals such as Nature Communications, Cell Reports, Molecular Plant, Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Biology, Plant Biotechnology Journal, Plant Physiology, and Plant Communications.