What is Glycosyltransferase?
Glycosyltransferases belong to a class of enzymes that facilitate the transfer of sugar moiety from activated sugar to carbohydrate or non-carbohydrate acceptors.
Apart from hyaluronan synthase, glycosyltransferases lengthen glycans by adding monosaccharides to non-reducing ends of the acceptor substrates. Transfer reactions are linkage-specific, and the resultant product is fixed within a specific anomeric configuration.
Glycosyltransferase-related genes comprise an essential portion of the genomes of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. When you add all transporters and enzymes necessary to make substrates and glycosylation, as much as 5 percent of genomes contain glycosylation-related genes. Globally, over 30,000 glycosyltransferases have been identified to the present.
Glycosyltransferase (GT) enzymes are different in their ability to enable the transfer of sugar molecules into carbohydrate, protein, and lipid substrates. GTs perform a range of operational and regulatory functions in biology. Glycosyltransferase targets are a source of diverse areas of therapeutic possibilities in a broad range of diseases that include metabolic disorders, cancer, and infectious diseases. The glycosyltransferase activity test can be used to thoroughly investigate GT targets to find new therapies.
From a research standpoint, GTs are gaining increasing popularity to be targets of “substrate reduction therapy” in the lysosomal storage disorder (LSDs) like Gaucher and Fabry disorders and disrupt the biosynthesis of bacterial cell walls. However, from an HTS standpoint, GTs are a challenging group of targets due to the variety of the substrates used for acceptors and donors.
While GTs employ a variety of acceptor substrates ranging from protein to small molecules, most GTs use only three nucleotide sugars for donors: GDP, UDP, or CMP. Since it is just one “donor product” for each kind of transfer group, one collection of detection reagents can be used to cover the entire family of GTs.
Classification by sequence
Sequence-based classification techniques have been proven to be an effective method of developing hypotheses regarding the function of proteins by comparing sequences to similar proteins. In the study conducted by cazy.org, the database of carbohydrate-active enzymes offers a sequence-based classification of glycosyltransferases in more than 85 families. The identical three-dimensional fold is predicted to be present within all these families.
Uses of Glycosyltransferase
Glycosyltransferases are extensively used for the production of glycoconjugates. These enzymes can be extracted from nature or created in a recombinant manner. In addition, whole cell-based systems that use glycosyl donors from the endogenous or cell-based systems comprising expressed and cloned systems to glycosyl donor synthesis are being developed.
Cell-free methods allow for the widespread application of glycosyltransferases to synthesize glycoconjugates and require access to huge glycosyl donor quantities. Additionally, nucleotide recycling methods have been created that permit the resynthesis of glycosyl donors from the released nucleotide. This method of recycling nucleotides is also beneficial in cutting down on the quantity of nucleotides formed as a byproduct, thus decreasing any inhibition that is caused to the glycosyltransferase that is of interest as a typical feature of the byproducts of nucleotides.
Why Are They Important in Your Health?
In the context of human health, Glycans are implicated in numerous processes that form part of normal development, physiology, and cell signaling. They are also involved in the progression of chronic and infectious illnesses. Glycans, for instance, on cell surfaces play a crucial role in molecular identification. One instance of this is the transport of blood white cells within the body to reach a point of infection, which allows an immune system to fight whenever required. A large portion of the information contained inside cells is stored by glycome.
Glycans are a vital source of biological data that can be used in conjunction with DNA-based information to aid in establishing the connection between genotype and personality, or in the case of genomes and the traits that are expressed. Many improvements in our understanding of the human body and its health stem from recent information about nucleic acids, protein, and glycans and how they differ in different situations and for different individuals. But, a lot is not known.
Continuous advances in understanding the biochemical functions played by glycans and the elements that affect or alter their function could have implications for biological understanding at the foundation and contribute to the development of new therapeutic medications.