Soft Materials Seminar - "Mapping the Substrate Specificity Landscape of Sugar Transporters through High-Throughput Mutational Screening"

Sugar transporters play essential roles in cellular metabolism, yet the sequence governing their substrate specificity remains poorly understood. We are developing a high-throughput yeast-based platform to systematically map the sequence–function landscape of sugar transporters. Using plant Sugar Transport Proteins (STPs) and human glucose transporters (GLUTs) as model systems, we coupled transporter activity to yeast growth on defined sugar substrates, enabling functional selection of transporter variants. This platform can be combined with saturation mutagenesis and deep sequencing to identify mutations that change transport activity and substrate preference. Ultimately, these studies aim to uncover molecular principles governing substrate recognition and enable the engineering of transporters with altered specificity.