A special issue on glucose transporters in health and disease
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EDITORIAL
A special issue on glucose transporters in health and disease Hermann Koepsell 1 & Volker Vallon 2,3,4 Received: 16 July 2020 / Revised: 16 July 2020 / Accepted: 31 July 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Glucose is the most important energy carrier and building block in all kingdoms of life. As a consequence, the normal function of plants, bacteria, and animal organs depends on the continuous generation and/or supply and uptake of glucose. The goal of this Pflüger’s Special Issue is to summarize key concepts related to glucose transport in human health and disease, covering established paradigms but also recent developments and new insights that make this Special issue a timely endeavor. To put the topic in a larger perspective, we start the series with the role of sugar transport in plants and bacteria (Fig. 1). In contrast to animals and most bacteria, plants can synthesize a surplus of sugars. As a consequence, plants are autotrophic organisms and basically provide all food on earth, either directly or indirectly. The contribution by Geiger [4] discusses the role of glucose as the main building block for cellulose synthesis but also as a signaling molecule to adjust plant growth and survival to metabolic status. The author introduces the proton-coupled sugar transport proteins as the plant counterparts of the animal sodium-dependent glucose transporters (SGLTs), and discusses how they facilitate the fine-tuned transport across membranes of the plant body. Most animals can resorb only a small number of monosaccharides from the intestine, mostly D-glucose, D-galactose, This article is part of the Special Issue on “Glucose Transporters in Health and Disease” * Hermann Koepsell [email protected] * Volker Vallon [email protected] 1
Institute for Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
2
Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
3
Department of Pharmacology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
4
VA San Diego Healthcare System, San Diego, CA, USA
and D-fructose. Other sugars and dietary fibers are mainly degraded and metabolized by the bacteria in the lower intestine. The contribution by Jeckelmann and Ernie [8] describes the structures and mechanisms of bacterial sugar transporters, and how they can import structurally different sugars. The authors also discuss how some bacterial sugar transporters are hijacked for import of bacteriophage DNA and antibacterial toxins, and how the presence and uptake of sugars may affect pathogenicity. The contribution by Holman [7] introduces the first major family of mammalian glucose transporters, namely the SLC2 genes, which encode for facilitative glucose transporters of the GLUT protein family. The preferred substrates of these transporters are usually a hexose, but some GLUTs transport urate, dehydro-ascorbate, or myo-inositol. The main physiological functions of each of these GLUT proteins are briefly outl
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