Figure 6.

Mechanism of butyrate-mediated tumor suppression. In normal colonocytes (left), butyrate is utilized as the primary energy source and metabolized in the mitochondria so relatively little accumulates inside of the cell. In cancerous colonocytes (right), glucose is the primary energy source due to the Warburg effect. Butyrate is still transported into the cell via monocarboxylate transporters but is not metabolized in the mitochondria, which allows it to accumulate in the nucleus and function as an HDAC inhibitor to epigenetically regulate genes involved in cell proliferation and apoptosis.