Integration of family-wide information to probe the conformational landscape of sugar transporters

Abstract

Sugar transporters belong to a ubiquitous family of membrane proteins that transport sugarmolecules across the membrane cycling cycles through 4 conformational states following a rocker-switch mechanism. To transport sugar molecules, the large conformational changes required are induced by substrate binding. The current view of the mechanism has evolved with the deposition of new structures in the PDB database, currently numbering 17. However, the present view is based on comparing structures of different transporters, between which factors such as membrane environment, substrate specificity, and kinetics vary significantly.