Nature Communications (Jul 2018)

Glucose promotes cell growth by suppressing branched-chain amino acid degradation

  • Dan Shao,
  • Outi Villet,
  • Zhen Zhang,
  • Sung Won Choi,
  • Jie Yan,
  • Julia Ritterhoff,
  • Haiwei Gu,
  • Danijel Djukovic,
  • Danos Christodoulou,
  • Stephen C. Kolwicz,
  • Daniel Raftery,
  • Rong Tian

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05362-7
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 1
pp. 1 – 17

Abstract

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Hypertrophic cardiomyocytes switch their metabolism from fatty acid oxidation to glucose use, but the functional role of this change is unclear. Here the authors show that high intracellular glucose inhibits the degradation of branched-chain amino acids, which is required for the activation of pro-growth mTOR signaling.