Washington, October 21: Johns Hopkins scientists have found that sugar plays a significant role in how cells work, paving the way for new therapies for a number of diseases like diabetes, neurodegeneration, and cancer.
The researchers say that sugar may be as influential as phosphate in putting the proteins in cells on and off.
The conventional wisdom was that the job of turning proteins on and off fell to phosphates, which did so by fastening to and unfastening from proteins, a process called phosphorylation.
The latest research paper by the Johns Hopkins team suggests that sugar also plays a role in regulating phosphorylation itself.