Visualizing sweetness: increasingly diverse applications for fluorescent-tagged glucose bioprobes and their recent structural modifications.
Glucose homeostasis is a fundamental aspect of life and its dysregulation is associated with important diseases, such as cancer and diabetes. Traditionally, glucose radioisotopes have been used to monitor glucose utilization in biological systems. Fluorescent-tagged glucose analogues were initially developed in the 1980s, but it is only in the past decade that their use as a glucose sensor has increased significantly. These analogues were developed for monitoring glucose uptake in blood cells, but their recent applications include tracking glucose uptake by tumor cells and imaging brain cell metabolism. This review outlines the development of fluorescent-tagged glucose analogues, describes their recent structural modifications and discusses their increasingly diverse biological applications.
New Drug Targets Laboratory, School of Life Sciences, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju 500-712, Korea. kuhhan@hanmail.net
Woong Hee
WH
Kim
Jinho
J
Lee
Da-Woon
DW
Jung
Darren R
DR
Williams
D005456:Fluorescent Dyes / Q000737:chemistry*; D005947:Glucose / Q000737:chemistry*; D015394:Molecular Structure
D005456:Fluorescent Dyes; D005947:Glucose