Crotonylation promotes human embryonic stem cell endodermal lineage differentiation and metabolic switch

Abstract Post-translational modifications of proteins are crucial to the regulation of their activity and function. As a newly discovered acylation modification, crotonylation of non-histone proteins remains largely unexplored, particularly in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Here we report the investigation of induced crotonylation in hESCs, which resulted in hESCs of different pluripotency states differentiating into the endodermal lineage. We showed that increased protein crotonylation in hESCs was accompanied by transcriptomic shifts and decreased glycolysis. Through large-scale profiling of non-histone protein crotonylation, we identified metabolic enzymes as major targets of inducible crotonylation in hESCs. We further discovered GAPDH as a key glycolytic enzyme regulated by crotonylation during endodermal differentiation from hESCs, where crotonylation of GAPDH decreased its enzymatic activity thereby leading to reduced glycolysis. Our study demonstrates that crotonylation of glycolytic enzymes may be crucial to metabolic switching and cell fate determination in hESCs.