Abstract
UDP-glycosyltransferases (UGTs) are important conjugation enzymes found in all kingdoms of life, catalyzing a sugar conjugation with small lipophilic compounds and playing a crucial role in detoxification and homeostasis. The UGT gene family is defined by a signature motif in the C-terminal domain where the uridine diphosphate (UDP)-sugar donor binds. UGTs have been identified in a number of insect genomes over the last decade and much progress has been achieved in characterizing their expression patterns and molecular functions. Here, we present an update of the complete repertoire of UGT genes in Drosophila melanogaster and provide a brief overview of the latest research in this model insect. A total of 35 UGT genes are found in the D. melanogaster genome, localized to chromosomes 2 and 3 with a high degree of gene duplications on the chromosome arm 3R. All D. melanogaster UGT genes have now been named in FlyBase according to the unified UGT nomenclature guidelines. A phylogenetic analysis of UGT genes shows lineage-specific gene duplications. Analysis of anatomical and induced gene expression patterns demonstrate that some UGT genes are differentially expressed in various tissues or after environmental treatments. Extended searches of UGT orthologs from 18 additional Drosophila species reveal a diversity of UGT gene numbers and composition. The roles of Drosophila UGTs identified to date are briefly reviewed, and include xenobiotic metabolism, nicotine resistance, olfaction, cold tolerance, sclerotization, pigmentation, and immunity. Together, the updated genomic information and research overview provided herein will aid further research in this developing field.
Highlights
uridine diphosphate (UDP)-glycosyltransferases (UGTs) are a superfamily of enzymes found in all kingdoms of life, including animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and some viruses (Bock, 2016)
The same notion has been adopted for non-mammalian UGTs (Meech et al, 2012), including insects as they predominantly use UDP-glucose as the sugar donor (Myers and Smith, 1954; Dutton and Ko, 1964; Ahmad and Forgash, 1976; Kramer and Hopkins, 1987; Rausell et al, 1997; Wang et al, 1999)
A little later, five other D. melanogaster UGT genes, Ugt35a, Ugt35b, Ugt37a1, Ugt37b1, and Ugt37c1, were among the first UGT genes to be named in consultation with the UGT Nomenclature Committee (Wang et al, 1999)
Summary
UDP-glycosyltransferases (UGTs) are a superfamily of enzymes found in all kingdoms of life, including animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and some viruses (Bock, 2016). During the last two decades, genome and transcriptome sequencing of insects has generated genome-wide analyses of UGT genes in a variety of insects (Luque and O’Reilly, 2002; Huang et al, 2008; Ahn et al, 2012; Hu B. et al, 2019), revealing that the UGT gene family comprises multiple genes in each species, ranging from 12 (honeybee) to 58 (aphid) (Ahn et al, 2012) Given these and similar studies of non-insect genomes, the UGT Nomenclature Committee was formed to assign systematic names to the large number of UGTs, defining the families (e.g., UGT36) and subfamilies (e.g., UGT36A) at >45% and >60% amino acid sequence identity, respectively. We identify orthologous genes from 18 additional Drosophila species in order to view the D. melanogaster UGTs from an evolutionary perspective
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
