Molecular identification of novel glucose transporter from clonorchis sinensis

초록

The Clonorchis sinensis (Cs) is the primary cause of clonorchiasis, which affects 15?20 million people in Korea, Japan, Southern China, and other Southeast Asian countries. Infected patients exhibit clinical symptoms, such as biliary stone, dull epigastric pain, obstructive jaundice, and ascites and so on. Because of difficulty of praziquantel by side effect, the development of new therapeutic drug is necessary. In order to establishment of new drug screening system, we focus to major facilitator superfamily as a drug target. We could find several glucose transporter candidates, Among these, a complementary DNA (cDNA) encoding a new glucose transporter of Cs (NCSG) was isolated from the adult Cs cDNA library. The NCSG consists of 1771 base pairs that encode a 497 amino acid residue protein. Hydropathy analysis suggested that NCSG possess 11 putative membrane-spanning domains. NCSG showed 54% amino acid homology to CsGLUT already reported by us. The northern blot analysis using total RNA of adult Cs showed about 1.8 kb message band. The functional characterization should be performed. From these results, NCSG as well as CsGLUT may be an useful drug screening system for Clonorchis sinensis.