NHX-5, an Endosomal Na+/H+ Exchanger, Is Associated with Metformin Action*
- Jeongho Kim‡,
- Hye-Yeon Lee‡,
- Jheesoo Ahn§,
- Moonjung Hyun§,
- Inhwan Lee§,
- Kyung-Jin Min‡ and
- Young-Jai You§,¶1
- From the ‡Department of Biological Sciences, Inha University, Incheon 22212, South Korea,
- the §Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia 23298, and
- the ¶Nagoya Research Center for Brain & Neural Circuits, Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8602, Japan
- ↵1 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: yjyou{at}bio.nagoya-u.ac.jp.
Abstract
Diabetes is one of the most impactful diseases worldwide. The most commonly prescribed anti-diabetic drug is metformin. In this study, we identified an endosomal Na+/H+ exchanger (NHE) as a new potential target of metformin from an unbiased screen in Caenorhabditis elegans. The same NHE homolog also exists in flies, where it too mediates the effects of metformin. Our results suggest that endosomal NHEs could be a metformin target and provide an insight into a novel mechanism of action of metformin on regulating the endocytic cycle.
- autophagy
- Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans)
- drug action
- endosome
- metformin
- sodium-proton exchange
- Type 2 diabetes
- sodium-proton exchange
Footnotes
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↵* This work was supported by Inha University (to J. K.), Korean MEST Grant 2012R1A1A2041099 (to K. J. M.), Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine (to Y. J. Y.), and Nagoya Research Center for Brain & Neural Circuits (to Y. J. Y.). The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest with the contents of this article. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
- Received June 16, 2016.
- Revision received July 18, 2016.
- © 2016 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
