New insight into the classification and evolution of glucose transporters in the Metazoa

What is it about?

In this study, we used sequence similarity networks (SSNs) to classify and annotate 4,101 metazoan glucose transporter (GLUT) homologs. Although we confirmed previous findings that the 14 human GLUTs could be generally classified into three main classes, our SSNs distributed the hGLUTs among the classes in a manner different to the traditional classification system. The hGLUTs in each class showed unique evolutionary characteristics, having similar nonsynonymous-to-synonymous divergence ratios and similar regions under conservative selection pressure. We also found GLUTs with 3, 6, 18, 24, and 36 transmembrane helixes (TMHs), aside from those with the more common 12 TMHs. We believe that our study makes a significant contribution to the literature because this new classification of the hGLUTS is more precise than the traditional classification system and would be useful for future functional studies of these proteins. Moreover, our results give further insight into the evolutionary patterns of the metazoan GLUTs, where it is suggested that gene duplication and fusion could have been important drivers of their evolution.

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