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Annual Review of Plant Biology

Volume 76, 2025

Nucleotide Sugar Transporters: Orchestrating Luminal Glycosylation in Plants

  • Berit Ebert1,2 and Ariel Orellana3
  • 1Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany; email: [email protected] 2School of Biosciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3Centro de Biotecnología Vegetal, Facultad de Ciencias de la Vida, Instituto Milenio Centro de Regulación del Genoma, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile
  • Vol. 76:53-83 (Volume publication date May 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on March 04, 2025
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s) and Universidad Andrés Bello.
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Eukaryotic glycobiology revolves around nucleotide sugar transporters (NSTs), which are critical for glycan biosynthesis in the Golgi apparatus and endoplasmic reticulum. In plants, NSTs share similarities with triose phosphate translocators (TPTs) and together form the NST/TPT superfamily. Major research efforts over the last decades have led to the biochemical characterization of several of these transporters and addressed their role in cell wall polysaccharide and glycoconjugate biosynthesis, revealing precise substrate specificity and function. While recent insights gained from NST and TPT crystal structures promise to unravel the molecular mechanisms governing these membrane proteins, their regulation and dynamic behavior remain enigmatic. Likewise, many uncharacterized and orphan NSTs pose exciting questions about the biology of the endomembrane system. We discuss the progress in this active research area and stimulate consideration for the intriguing outstanding questions with a view to establish a foundation for applications in plant engineering and biopolymer production.

Keyword(s): endoplasmic reticulum, glycosylation, Golgi apparatus, nucleotide sugar transporters, nucleotide sugars
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2025-05-20
2025-06-16
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-arplant-083123-075017
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Nucleotide Sugar Transporters: Orchestrating Luminal Glycosylation in Plants
Annual Review of Plant Biology 76, 53 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-arplant-083123-075017
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-arplant-083123-075017
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-arplant-083123-075017
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