An international research team has identified the human gene SLC35F2 as a transporter that enables cellular uptake of the micronutrients queuine and queuosine—compounds acquired from diet and gut bacteria. The work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses a long-standing question about how these tRNA-related nutrients enter human cells.
An international team led in part by scientists at the University of Florida and Trinity College Dublin has identified SLC35F2 as a key gene involved in bringing the micronutrients queuine and queuosine into human cells.
The researchers reported that queuosine is a vitamin-like compound that humans cannot synthesize and instead obtain from certain foods and from bacteria in the gut. The nutrient is tied to transfer RNA (tRNA) biology, and the team said it influences how cells translate genetic information into proteins.
The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in a paper titled “The oncogene SLC35F2 is a high-specificity transporter for the micronutrients queuine and queuosine.” The ScienceDaily summary, based on materials from the University of Florida, described the result as resolving a question researchers have pursued for decades: how queuosine enters cells.
Valérie de Crécy-Lagard, a microbiology and cell science professor at the University of Florida and one of the study’s principal investigators, said researchers had long suspected a transporter existed. She also characterized queuosine as “like a nutrient that fine-tunes how your body reads your genes,” in reference to its role in processes affecting gene-to-protein translation.
The team said SLC35F2 had previously been studied in other contexts—such as how certain viruses and some cancer drugs enter cells—while its role in normal nutrient uptake was not clearly established. Vincent Kelly, a professor at Trinity College Dublin and a senior author on the paper, said scientists have long linked queuosine to processes including brain health, metabolic regulation, cancer and responses to stress, but that the mechanism for how it is salvaged from the gut and distributed into cells had not been clear.
According to the research organizations’ materials, the project involved researchers across multiple institutions, including the University of Florida and Trinity College Dublin, and received support from funding bodies including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Research Ireland, and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland. The researchers said the identification of the transporter could support further work on how diet and the microbiome affect human biology and may help guide future therapeutic research.
