Sugar addiction: An Achilles' heel of auto-immune diseases?

In this issue of Cell Metabolism, Hochrein et al. identify a metabolic checkpoint controlling the transcriptional programming of effector CD4 T cells. The authors show that GLUT3-mediated glucose import and ACLY-dependent acetyl-CoA generation control histone acetylation and, hence, the epigenetic imprinting of effector gene expression in differentiated effector CD4 T cells. These findings suggest a novel therapeutic target for inflammation-associated diseases.