The glucose analog 2-deoxyglucose (2DG) inhibits the growth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and human tumor cells, but its modes of action have not been fully elucidated. Yeast cells lacking Snf1 (AMP-activated protein kinase) are hypersensitive to 2DG. Overexpression of either of two low-affinity, high-capacity glucose transporters, Hxt1 and Hxt3, suppresses the 2DG hypersensitivity of snf1Δ cells...

Saccharomyces cerevisiae maintains a large family of hexose transporters encoded by the HXT genes. The major transporter genes, HXT1 through HXT7, were sequenced from four vineyard isolates and two commercial wine yeast strains and compared to the sequences in the Saccharomyces Genome Database for strain S288C and to those available for two additional wine strains V5 and RM11-1a. Base pair chan...

Fructose utilization by wine yeasts is critically important for the maintenance of a high fermentation rate at the end of alcoholic fermentation. A Saccharomyces cerevisiae wine yeast able to ferment grape must sugars to dryness was found to have a high fructose utilization capacity. We investigated the molecular basis of this enhanced fructose utilization capacity by studying the properties of...

Arsenic trioxide is a toxic metalloid and carcinogen that is also used as an anticancer drug, and for this reason it is important to identify the routes of arsenite uptake by cells. In this study the ability of hexose transporters to facilitate arsenic trioxide uptake in Saccharomyces cerevisiae was examined. In the absence of glucose, strains with disruption of the arsenite efflux gene ACR3 ac...

HXT4, a new member of the hexose transporter (HXT) family in Saccharomyces cerevisiae was identified by its ability to suppress the snf3 mutation in multicopy. Multicopy HXT4 increases both high and low affinity glucose transport in snf3 strains and increases low and high transport in wild-type strains. Characterization of HXT4 led to the discovery of a new class of multicopy suppressors of glu...

Rgt1 is a glucose-responsive transcription factor that binds to the promoters of several HXT genes encoding glucose transporters in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and regulates their expression in response to glucose. Rgt1 contains a Zn(2)Cys(6) binuclear cluster responsible for DNA binding. Most proteins that contain this sequence motif bind as dimers to regularly spaced pairs of the sequence CGG. H...

Glucose transport kinetics and mRNA levels of different glucose transporters were determined in Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains expressing different sugar kinases. During exponential growth on glucose, a hxk2 null strain exhibited high-affinity hexose transport associated with an elevated transcription of the genes HXT2 and HXT7, encoding high-affinity transporters, and a diminished expression...

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the fermentation rate and ability to complete sugar transformation process depend on glucose fructose transporter set-up. Hexose transport mainly occurs via facilitated diffusion carriers these are encoded by HXT gene family GAL2. addition, FSY1, coding a fructose/H+ symporter, was identified in some wine strains. This little-known could be relevant last part of whe...