Insect cells are used routinely to express recombinant mammalian glycoproteins. However, insect protein glycosylation pathways are not well understood and appear to differ from those of mammalian cells. One way to more clearly evaluate the protein glycosylation potential of insect cells is to use the Drosophila melanogaster genome to identify genes that might encode relevant functions. These genes can then be expressed and the functions of the gene products directly evaluated by biochemical assays. In this study, we used this approach to determine the function of a putative Drosophila nucleotide sugar transporter gene. The results showed that this gene encodes a protein that can transport UDP-galactose, but not CMP-sialic acid. Thus, Drosophila encodes at least some of the infrastructure needed to produce glycoproteins with complex glycans, but this particular gene product does not directly support glycoprotein sialylation. These findings are relevant to insect cell biology and to an informed consideration of insect cell expression systems as tools for recombinant glycoprotein production.
KeywordsGlycoproteins; Insect expression systems; Drosophila; Protein glycosylation; Nucleotide sugar transporter The development of baculovirus-insect cell [1,2] and constitutive insect cell [3,4] expression systems has stimulated great interest in the nature of the protein glycosylation and glycan processing machinery in these cells. Currently, it seems clear that there is at least one major difference between insect and mammalian protein glycosylation pathways. Specifically, insect cells appear to be unable to produce sialylated glycoproteins (reviewed in [5][6][7][8]). The earliest indications of this difference came from a comprehensive survey, which showed that insects had no detectable sialic acids [9]. This finding was extended by biochemical studies, which showed that insect cells had no detectable sialyltransferase activity and produced no detectable sialylated N-glycans [10][11][12][13]. More recent studies have shown that the major Nglycans produced by insect cells are high mannose or paucimannose structures and their major O-glycans are monosaccharides or core 1 disaccharides with no terminal sialic acids (reviewed in [5][6][7][8]). In addition, recent studies have confirmed the absence of detectable sialyltransferase activity and CMP-sialic acids in insect cells [14,15] insects. Two transgenic lepidopteran insect cell lines engineered to express mammalian β1,4-galactosyltransferase and α2,6-sialyltransferase genes produced sialylated glycoproteins, indicating that they must be able to produce CMP-sialic acid and transport it into the Golgi apparatus [23,24]. Finally, three lepidopteran insect cell lines were able to produce sialylated recombinant glycoproteins when treated with a βN-acetylglucosaminidase inhibitor, indicating that they have all the machinery needed to produce complex, terminally sialylated N-glycans when the action of this putative N-glycan trimming enzyme is inhibited [25].
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