The capacity of the liver to regenerate is likely to be encoded as a plasticity of molecular networks within the liver. By applying a combination of comprehensive analyses of the epigenome, transcriptome, and proteome, we herein depict the molecular landscape of liver regeneration. We demonstrated that histone H3 Lys-4 was trimethylated at the promoter regions of many loci, among which only a fraction, including cell-cycle-related genes, were transcriptionally up-regulated. A cistrome analysis guided by the histone methylation patterns and the transcriptome identified FOXM1 as the key transcription factor promoting liver regeneration, which was confirmed in vitro using a hepatocarcinoma cell line.
