{"doi":"10.3390/ijms22073572","title":"Function Trumps Form in Two Sugar Symporters, LacY and vSGLT","abstract":"Active transport of sugars into bacteria occurs through symporters driven by ion gradients. LacY is the most well-studied proton sugar symporter, whereas vSGLT is the most characterized sodium sugar symporter. These are members of the major facilitator (MFS) and the amino acid-Polyamine organocation (APS) transporter superfamilies. While there is no structural homology between these transporters, they operate by a similar mechanism. They are nano-machines driven by their respective ion electrochemical potential gradients across the membrane. LacY has 12 transmembrane helices (TMs) organized in two 6-TM bundles, each containing two 3-helix TM repeats. vSGLT has a core structure of 10 TM helices organized in two inverted repeats (TM 1–5 and TM 6–10). In each case, a single sugar is bound in a central cavity and sugar selectivity is determined by hydrogen- and hydrophobic- bonding with side chains in the binding site. In vSGLT, the sodium-binding site is formed through coordination with carbonyl- and hydroxyl-oxygens from neighboring side chains, whereas in LacY the proton (H3O+) site is thought to be a single glutamate residue (Glu325). The remaining challenge for both transporters is to determine how ion electrochemical potential gradients drive uphill sugar transport.","journal":"International Journal of Molecular Sciences","year":2021,"id":204224,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9549,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":437903,"name":"Ernest M. Wright","orcid":"0000-0002-1023-4391","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":345738,"name":"Jeff Abramson","orcid":"0000-0003-0004-7426","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":38,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:51:22.166488Z","pmid":"33808202","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}