Identifying ENO1 as a protein target of chlorogenic acid to inhibit cellular senescence and prevent skin photoaging in mice

Cellular senescence plays a critical role in repeated ultraviolet (UV) exposure-induced skin photoaging. Currently, from the perspective of regulating senescent cells, potent compounds or reliable protein targets that could effectively prevent skin photoaging have not yet been reported. Herein, we demonstrated that chlorogenic acid (CGA) significantly inhibited UVA-induced senescence of human dermis skin fibroblasts (HDF) cells by screening the natural product library. The activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) result revealed that Enolase 1 (ENO1) is one of the direct targets of CGA in HDF cells. Further mechanism research indicated that CGA covalently binds to ENO1, and prevented UVA-induced cellular senescence by suppressing the activity of ENO1 protein to block the glycolytic pathway. Importantly, we found that CGA dose-dependently reduced the skin wrinkle score, alleviated skin pathological features and inhibited senescent characteristics in a photoaging mouse model. The proteomic analysis revealed that CGA treatment effectively inhibited senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) secretion and glycolysis in skin samples of mice. Collectively, our study not only demonstrated that inhibiting cell senescence is an effective anti-skin photoaging strategy, but also revealed that ENO1 is a promising protein target to prevent photoaging.