Opportunities for Therapeutic Modulation of O-GlcNAc.

-Linked β--acetylglucosamine (O-GlcNAc) is an essential, dynamic monosaccharide post-translational modification (PTM) found on serine and threonine residues of thousands of nucleocytoplasmic proteins. The installation and removal of O-GlcNAc is controlled by a single pair of enzymes, O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) and O-GlcNAcase (OGA), respectively. Since its discovery four decades ago, O-GlcNAc has been found on diverse classes of proteins, playing important functional roles in many cellular processes.

Dual-specificity RNA aptamers: A sweet new tool for studying O-GlcNAc biology.

Zhu and Hart use dual-specificity RNA aptamers to recruit cellular O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) and induce O-GlcNAc on target proteins like β-catenin, revealing that O-GlcNAc stabilizes β-catenin and enhances its transcriptional activity.