Extracellular gating of glucose transport through GLUT 1

The ubiquitous glucose transporter 1 (GLUT1) is physiologically and pathologically relevant in energy metabolism of the CNS, skeletal muscles, cancer cells etc. Extensive experiments on GLUT1 produced thorough understandings of its expressions, functions, and structures which were recently resolved to atomic accuracy. However, theoretical understandings are still controversial about how GLUT1 facilitates glucose diffusion across the cell membrane. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the current literature have GLUT1 embedded in a symmetric bilayer of a single lipid type. They provide atomistic illustrations of the alternating access theory (AAT), but the simulation results are inconsistent with the undisputed experimental data of kinetics showing rapid transport of glucose at near-physiological temperatures, high Arrhenius activation barrier in zero-trans uptake, and large trans-acceleration at sub-physiological temperatures. In this research, we embedded GLUT1 in an asymmetric bilayer of multiple lipids to better mimic the erythrocyte membrane. We ran unbiased MD simulations at 37 °C and at 5 °C and found a new mechanism of glucose transport via GLUT1: The extracellular (EC) gate opened wide for EC glucopyranose at 37 °C and, only in the presence of intracellular (IC) glucose, at 5 °C. In the absence of IC glucose at 5 °C, the EC gate opened narrowly for acyclic glucose, gating out glucopyranose. This EC-gating mechanism is simpler than AAT and yet it well explains for the rapid glucose transport at near-physiological temperatures and large trans-acceleration at sub-physiological temperatures. It also explains why zero-trans uptake (involving the pyranose-to-aldehyde transformation) has an Arrhenius barrier ∼20 kcal/mol higher than the equilibrium exchange transport.