Capsaicin upregulates HDAC2 via TRPV1 and impairs neuronal maturation in mice

Transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) affects mood and neuroplasticity in the brain, where its role is poorly understood. In the present study we investigated whether capsaicin (8-methyl-N-vanillyl-trans-6-nonenamide), an agonist of TRPV1, induced chromatin remodeling and thereby altered gene expression related to synaptic plasticity. We found that capsaicin treatment resulted in upregulation of histone deacetylase 2 (HDAC2) in the mouse hippocampus and HDAC2 was enriched at Psd95, synaptophysin, GLUR1, GLUR2 promoters. Viral-mediated hippocampal knockdown of HDAC2 induced expression of Synapsin I and prevented the detrimental effects of capsaicin on Synapsin I expression in mice, supporting the role of HDAC2 in regulation of capsaicin-induced Synapsin I expression. Taken together, our findings implicate HDAC2 in capsaicin-induced transcriptional regulation of synaptic molecules and support the view that HDAC2 is a molecular link between TRPV1 activity and synaptic plasticity.This work was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2017), a grant from the Medical Research Center (NRF-2017R1A5A2015395), and Basic Science Research Program though the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (No. 2016R1A2B2006474, 2017R1A6A3A01005765)