Autophagy is a critical catabolic pathway that enables cells to survive and adapt to stressful conditions, especially nutrient deprivation. The fusion of autophagic vacuoles with lysosomes is the final step of autophagy, which degrades the engulfed contents into metabolic precursors for re-use by the cell. O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) plays a crucial role in regulating autophagy flux in response to nutrient stress, particularly by targeting key proteins involved in autophagosome-lysosome fusion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSialylation of cell surface glycans plays an essential role in cell-cell interaction and communication of cells with their microenvironment. Among the tools that have been developed for the study of sialylation in living cells, metabolic oligosaccharide engineering (MOE) exploits the biosynthetic pathway of sialic acid (Sia) to incorporate unnatural monosaccharides into nascent sialylatedglycoconjugates, followed by their detection by a bioorthogonal ligation of a molecular probe. Among bioorthogonal reactions, the copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) is the only ligation where both reactive tags can be switched on the chemical reporter or on the probe, making this reaction very flexible and adaptable to various labeling strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFatty acid synthase (FASN) participates in many fundamental biological processes, including energy storage and signal transduction, and is overexpressed in many cancer cells. We previously showed in a context of lipogenesis that FASN is protected from degradation by its interaction with O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) in a nutrient-dependent manner. We and others also reported that OGT and O-GlcNAcylation up-regulate the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway that senses mitogenic signals and nutrient availability to drive cell cycle.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColorectal cancer (CRC) affects both women and men living in societies with a high sedentary lifestyle. Amongst the phenotypic changes exhibited by tumor cells, a wide range of glycosylation has been reported for colon cancer-derived cell lines and CRC tissues. These aberrant modifications affect different aspects of glycosylation, including an increase in core fucosylation and GlcNAc branching on N-glycans, alteration of O-glycans, upregulated sialylation, and O-GlcNAcylation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Endocrinol (Lausanne)
February 2019
Cyclin D1 is the regulatory partner of the cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) CDK4 or CDK6. Once associated and activated, the cyclin D1/CDK complexes drive the cell cycle entry and G1 phase progression in response to extracellular signals. To ensure their timely and accurate activation during cell cycle progression, cyclin D1 turnover is finely controlled by phosphorylation and ubiquitination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF