Glycosylation Precursors

Hudson H. Freeze; Gerald W. Hart; Ronald L. Schnaar

doi:10.1101/glycobiology.3e.005

Glycosylation Precursors

Review

In: Essentials of Glycobiology [Internet]. 3rd edition. Cold Spring Harbor (NY): Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 2015. Chapter 5.

2017.

Authors

Hudson H. Freeze, Gerald W. Hart, Ronald L. Schnaar

Book Editors

Book Affiliations

¹ Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Cellular & Molecular Medicine, Co-Director, Glycobiology Research and Training Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
² Professor of Surgery, Director, National Center for Functional Glycomics, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
³ Distinguished Professor of Cellular & Molecular Medicine, Co-Director, Glycobiology Research and Training Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
⁴ Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Chair and Professor of Cell Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, New York, USA
⁵ Professor and Chairman of Biological Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
⁶ Professor of Mycology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
⁷ Regents Professor and Director, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA
⁸ Professor, Laboratory of Immunoglycobiology, WPI Immunology Frontier Research Center, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
⁹ Professor of Glycoproteomics and Glycomics, Macquarie University and Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University, Sydney, Australia
¹⁰ Professor and Eminent Scholar, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA
¹¹ Professor, Departments of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
¹² Director, Max-Planck-Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

Excerpt

In nature, most glycans are synthesized by glycosyltransferases, enzymes that transfer activated forms of monosaccharides from nucleotide sugars and lipid-linked sugar intermediates to acceptors including proteins, lipids, and growing glycan chains. Monosaccharide precursors are imported into the cell, salvaged from degraded glycans, or created enzymatically from other sugars within the cell. In eukaryotic cells glycosylation occurs mostly in the Golgi apparatus, even though monosaccharide activation and interconversions occur mostly in the cytoplasm. Nucleotide sugar–specific transporters carry activated sugar donors into the Golgi. In some cases, nucleotide sugars are used to synthesize activated lipid-linked intermediates before glycan transfer. This chapter describes how cells accomplish these tasks, with an emphasis on animal cells.

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