GLDC interacts with VPS34 to inhibit tumorigenesis and epithelial-mesenchymal transition in hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) accounts for 90% of primary liver cancer with high mortality and limited therapeutic strategy. Glycine decarboxylase (GLDC) is the key limiting enzyme in glycine breakdown metabolism and acts as oncogene or tumor suppressor to impact tumor onset and progression in a context dependent manner. However, the underlying mechanism of GLDC on autophagy and progression is largely unexplored in HCC. Here, we showed that GLDC overexpression inhibited cell proliferation, cell migration and promoted cell senescence and autophagy in HCC. Intriguingly, induced GLDC remarkably attenuated epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) progress and tumor growth in vitro and in vivo. Mechanically, we demonstrated that GLDC upregulated VPS34 protein and enhanced its interaction with VPS34, thus promoting the association of VPS34 with Beclin1/ ATG14 complex and autophagy induction in HCC. Importantly, GLDC acetylation at K514 promoted interaction of GLDC-VPS34, whereas GLDC acetylation-dead mutant K514R abolished their binding. Furthermore, GLDC protein was decreased in HCC tissues compared with para-tumor tissues and reduced GLDC was significantly correlated with poor prognosis of patients. In conclusion, we unveil the key regulatory role of GLDC in autophagy and HCC progression through VPS34 and provide a potential strategy for HCC therapy.

Keywords

GLDC / Acetylation / VPS34 / Epithelial-mesenchymal transition / HCC

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zan Song: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Hao Dong: Visualization, Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Kailing Zhang: Visualization, Methodology, Investigation. Bingke Qiao: Visualization, Methodology, Investigation. Leilei Li: Visualization, Investigation. Zhicheng Zhang: Visualization, Investigation. Zhili Fan: Visualization, Investigation. Jing Li: Visualization, Investigation. Yu Li: Visualization, Investigation. Mengfei Liu: Visualization, Investigation. Ying Liu: Visualization, Investigation. Xinyu Gu: Visualization, Investigation. Tao Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Ethical approval

All animal experiments were approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee of Shandong University. (Approval No. 230067).

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

Declaration of generative AI in scientific writing

Not applicable.

Funding information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82104218), the Taishan Scholars Program (TSQN201909033) of Shandong Province and the program for Multidisciplinary Research and Innovation Team of Young Scholars of Shandong University (2020QNQT002).

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Translational Medicine Core Facility of Shandong University for consultation and instrument availability supporting this work. We also thank BioRender.com for assistance in creating the Graphical Abstract.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscia.2025.100072.

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