Schachter Harry
Program in Structural Biology and Biochemistry, Hospital for Sick Children, 555 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1X8, Canada.
Curr Opin Struct Biol. 2004 Oct;14(5):607-16. doi: 10.1016/j.sbi.2004.09.005.
From observations on human diseases and mutant mice, it has become clear that glycosylation plays a major role in metazoan development. Caenorhabditis elegans provides powerful tools to study this problem that are not available in men or mice. The worm has many genes homologous to mammalian genes involved in glycosylation. Glycobiologists have, in recent years, cloned and expressed some of these genes and studied the effects of mutations on worm development. Recent studies have focused on N-glycosylation, lumenal nucleoside diphosphatases, the resistance of C. elegans to a bacterial toxin and infections, fucosylation and proteoglycans.
通过对人类疾病和突变小鼠的观察，已经明确糖基化在多细胞动物发育中起主要作用。秀丽隐杆线虫提供了研究此问题的强大工具，而这些工具在人类或小鼠中并不具备。该线虫有许多与参与糖基化的哺乳动物基因同源的基因。近年来，糖生物学家已经克隆并表达了其中一些基因，并研究了突变对蠕虫发育的影响。最近的研究集中在N-糖基化、内质网核苷二磷酸酶、秀丽隐杆线虫对细菌毒素和感染的抗性、岩藻糖基化和蛋白聚糖上。
