Histones are the chief components of chromatin. When being catalyzed by a series of histone modifying enzymes, histones may undergo various post-translational modifications such as acetylation, methylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitylation and SUMOylation. The dysregulation of histone modifying enzymes will alter the histone post-modification patterns and cause diverse diseases including cancers. Consequently, the histone modifying enzymes have emerged as the promising biomarkers for disease diagnosis and prognosis. In this review, we summarize the recent researches about the histone modifying enzymes as the disease biomarkers, and highlight the development of methods for histone modifying enzyme assays.
Keywords: Assay development; cancer; disease biomarker; histone modifying enzyme; histone post-transcriptional modification.