Abstract

Deoxynivalenol (DON), as a secondary metabolite of fungi, is continually detected in livestock feed and has a high risk to animals and humans. Moreover, pigs are very sensitive to DON. Recently, the role of histone modification has drawn people’s attention; however, few studies have elucidated how histone modification participates in the cytotoxicity or genotoxicity induced by mycotoxins. In this study, we used intestinal porcine epithelial cells (IPEC-J2 cells) as a model to DON exposure in vitro. Mixed lineage leukemia 1 (MLL1) regulates gene expression by exerting the role of methyltransferase. Our studies demonstrated that H3K4me3 enrichment was enhanced andMLL1was highly upregulated upon 1 μg/mL DON exposure in IPEC-J2 cells. We found that the silencing ofMLL1resulted in increasing the apoptosis rate, arresting the cell cycle, and activating the mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) pathway. An RNA-sequencing analysis proved that differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were enriched in the cell cycle, apoptosis, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) signaling pathway between the knockdown ofMLL1and negative control groups, which were associated with cytotoxicity induced by DON. In summary, these current results might provide new insight into howMLL1regulates cytotoxic effects induced by DON via an epigenetic mechanism.Keywords:deoxynivalenol;IPEC-J2 cells;MLL1;H3K4me3;transcriptome