Monosaccharides articles from across Nature Portfolio

Monitoring glycosylation is a key quality control for protein therapeutics, however, most established methods such as hydrophilic interaction chromatography with fluorescence detection (HILIC-Fld) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) require time-consuming procedures and complicated data analysis. Here, the authors apply high performance anion exchange chromatography coupled to pulsed amperometric detection (HPAEC-PAD) for the batch-to-batch monitoring of glycans on complex antigens with a simplified procedure.

Transport assays using purified glucose transporters (GLUTs) have proven to be difficult to implement, hampering deeper mechanistic insights. Here the authors have optimized a transport assay in liposomes that will provide insight to study other membrane transport proteins.

Haloacid dehalogenase-like phosphatases are widespread across all domains of life and play a crucial role in the regulation of levels of sugar phosphate metabolites in cells. The authors report on the structure-guided engineering of phosphatases for dedicated substrate specificity for the conversion of sucrose and starch into fructose and mannose.

Aberrant expression of fucosylated glycans has been linked to several disease states. Control of fucose expression on live cells is needed to aid research and therapy development. Here the authors report on the development of a class of fucosylation metabolic prodrug inhibitors and demonstrated inhibition of cellular fucosylation.

Glucose transporter-mediated uptake of glucose is a key metabolic checkpoint in T cells. Fu et al. have identified GLUT2 as a critical regulator of CD8⁺ T cell metabolism and function in response to glucose and oxygen availability.