In Your Stride

We all know that sugar can give us a burst of energy. But glucose – sugar in its basic molecular form – also sustains all the molecular, cellular, and whole-body processes that keep us going. How the body is making use of glucose is an important indicator of health, so researchers are interested in tracking this progress. However, current tools for observing glucose’s journey are limited to the first steps of its metabolism, meaning it’s hard to see what happens next. A new technique called STRIDE can image the full picture of glucose uptake and metabolism, even after it is broken down into component parts and being used by cells after six days (seen here in blue, permeated through a slice of mouse tissue). Imaging glucose metabolism could ultimately help give a clear view of how diseased organs are behaving, and help develop our understanding of the way cancers power their deadly development.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Luyuan Zhang and colleagues
• Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by Nature Publishing Group 2019; reproduced with permission
• Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, April 2019