Research Briefs

Study researchers, left to right, Victor Hsu, MD, Ming Bai, PhD, and Jian Li, PhD

Victor W. Hsu, MD, of the Department of Medicine and Department of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy, and colleagues have advanced a molecular understanding of how a glucose transporter undergoes endocytic recycling by identifying a novel clathrin coat complex that acts at its early mechanistic steps. This process that occurs in fat and muscle cells is critical for glucose homeostasis, and defect in this process contributes to diabetes mellitus type 2.

Moreover, their findings advance a basic understanding of endocytic recycling, because in contrast to all other intracellular transport pathways currently known, coat proteins have not been predicted to play a significant role. These findings will appear in the July 30, 2007 issue of Journal of Cell Biology.

Dr. Hsu and colleagues believe that their findings will now allow a more complete analysis of the different ways by which diabetes mellitus type 2 occurs, because this disease is polygenic. Thus, the next steps for these researchers will be a systematic screening of molecular components of the coat complex and their regulators to see which may be targeted by insulin signaling.

The National Institutes of Health funded this research.