Insulin resistance is a major risk factor for numerous diseases including Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These disorders have dramatically increased in incidence with modern life, suggesting that excess nutrients and obesity are major causes of 'common' insulin resistance. Despite considerable effort, the mechanisms that contribute to 'common' insulin resistance are not resolved. There is universal agreement that extracellular perturbations such as nutrient excess, hyperinsulinemia, glucocorticoids or inflammation trigger intracellular stress in key metabolic target tissues, such as muscle and adipose tissue, and this impairs the ability of insulin to initiate its normal metabolic actions in these cells. Here we present evidence that the impairment in insulin action is independent of proximal elements of the insulin signaling pathway, but rather is likely specific to the glucoregulatory branch of insulin signaling. We propose that many intracellular stress pathways act in concert to increase mitochondrial reactive oxygen species to trigger insulin resistance. We speculate that this may be a physiological pathway to conserve glucose during specific states such as fasting, and that in the presence of chronic nutrient excess this pathway ultimately leads to disease. This review highlights key points in this pathway that require further research effort. Insulin resistance is a pathophysiological state where cells display reduced responsiveness to the glucose-lowering activity of insulin. While there are rare cases where mutations in genes associated with insulin signaling or lipodystrophy cause insulin resistance, for the most part insulin resistance is associated with obesity and thus a state of positive energy balance. This form of insulin resistance is frequently associated with hyperinsulinemia, increased waist circumference or visceral adiposity, metabolic dyslipidemia with high triglycerides and low HDL, and hepatic steatosis, features collectively referred to as the metabolic syndrome. We refer to this as "common insulin resistance". Here, both insulin-dependent glucose disposal and suppression of glucose output are impaired, albeit the relative degree of impairment in each process can vary between individuals (1-3).In this review we focus on the literature surrounding insulin resistance in muscle and adipose tissue, and specifically on insulin-stimulated glucose transport into myocytes and adipocytes within these tissues. Impaired insulin action in other tissues, most notably the liver (4, 5), brain (6, 7) and vasculature (8), also play a key role in whole body insulin resistance, and we direct readers to reviews that explore insulin resistance at these sites in detail. We will examine the evidence that common insulin resistance, in the context of muscle and adipose tissue, results from a defect in 'proximal' insulin signaling, which we define for the purposes of this review as the signaling intermediates that lead to the activation of Akt. We argue that common insulin resistance arises ...

Protein oxidation sits at the intersection of multiple signalling pathways, yet the magnitude and extent of crosstalk between oxidation and other post-translational modifications remains unclear. Here, we delineate global changes in adipocyte signalling networks following acute oxidative stress and reveal considerable crosstalk between cysteine oxidation and phosphorylation-based signalling. Oxidation of key regulatory kinases, including Akt, mTOR and AMPK influences the fidelity rather than their absolute activation state, highlighting an unappreciated interplay between these modifications. Mechanistic analysis of the redox regulation of Akt identified two cysteine residues in the pleckstrin homology domain (C60 and C77) to be reversibly oxidized. Oxidation at these sites affected Akt recruitment to the plasma membrane by stabilizing the PIP3 binding pocket. Our data provide insights into the interplay between oxidative stress-derived redox signalling and protein phosphorylation networks and serve as a resource for understanding the contribution of cellular oxidation to a range of diseases.

Edited by Alex TokerThe Ser/Thr protein kinase Akt regulates essential biological processes such as cell survival, growth, and metabolism. Upon growth factor stimulation, Akt is phosphorylated at Ser 474 ; however, how this phosphorylation contributes to Akt activation remains controversial. Previous studies, which induced loss of Ser 474 phosphorylation by ablating its upstream kinase mTORC2, have implicated Ser 474 phosphorylation as a driver of Akt substrate specificity. Here we directly studied the role of Akt2 Ser 474 phosphorylation in 3T3-L1 adipocytes by preventing Ser 474 phosphorylation without perturbing mTORC2 activity. This was achieved by utilizing a chemical genetics approach, where ectopically expressed S474A Akt2 was engineered with a W80A mutation to confer resistance to the Akt inhibitor MK2206, and thus allow its activation independent of endogenous Akt. We found that insulin-stimulated phosphorylation of four bona fide Akt substrates (TSC2, PRAS40, FOXO1/3a, and AS160) was reduced by ϳ50% in the absence of Ser 474 phosphorylation. Accordingly, insulin-stimulated mTORC1 activation, protein synthesis, FOXO nuclear exclusion, GLUT4 translocation, and glucose uptake were attenuated upon loss of Ser 474 phosphorylation. We propose a model where Ser 474 phosphorylation is required for maximal Akt2 kinase activity in adipocytes.

A single hypervariable autosomal gene locus, PUM, codes for a family of mucin-type glycoproteins present in human urine, and in several other normal and malignant tissues of epithelial origin. These mucins can be detected after electrophoresis using a series of monoclonal antibodies that show a pronounced tumour specificity on immunohistochemistry. lising a recently cloned cDNA, pMUC10, coding for the core protein of the PUM coded mucins, to probe DNA isolated from a series of human-rodent somatic cell hybrids, we have assigned the PUM locus to chromosome 1. This assignment was confirmed by in situ hybridization of pMUClO to lymphocyte metaphase chromosomes and the gene was shown to be located within the region lq2 1-24. D. 31. SWALLOW AND OTHERS ! J . ( 1 Y t i i ) . ('lonir~g the c1)SA coding for differentiation and tumour-associated mucin glycoproteins expressed by human mammary epithelium. Proc. Sat1 dcad. S c i . I'S=l (In the Press).

A large novel deletional PO thalassaemia mutation associated with unusually high levels of haemoglobin (Hb) A2 in heterozygotes is described in two unrelated subjects of Filipino background. The deletion was characterised by DNA mapping including pulsed field gel electrophoresis.Filipino pO thalassaemia extends for approximately 45 kb beginning approximately 1 5 kb 3' to the 6 globin gene. It is the largest deletion to date which gives rise to the PO thalassaemia phenotype. This mutation, similar to previously described deletional pO thalassaemias associated with high Hb A2, removes sequences 5' to the /1 globin gene promoter and emphasises the functional importance of the 5' / globin region in eliciting the unusually high level of Hb A2. This example also suggests that it is the 3' sequences which are transposed rather than the actual deletion size which are significant in the raised fetal haemoglobin (Hb F) found with some of the thalassaemias.

Significance Both the mTORC2 and Ras-ERK pathways respond to growth factor stimulation and play critical roles in cell growth and proliferation, disarray of these pathways leads to many diseases, especially cancer. These two signaling pathways crosstalk at many levels; recently it's become clear that the SIN1 component of mTORC2 could interact with Ras family small GTPases, but how these two proteins interact at the molecular level and the functional outcomes of this interaction remain to be addressed. In this work we determined the high-resolution structure of Ras-SIN1 complexes and revealed the detailed interaction mechanism. We also showed that Ras-SIN1 association inhibits insulin-induced ERK activation. Insights from this work could improve our understanding of the disease-causing mechanism of errant mTORC2 or Ras proteins.

Summary Insulin's activation of PI3K/Akt signaling, stimulates glucose uptake by enhancing delivery of GLUT4 to the cell surface. Here we examined the origins of intercellular heterogeneity in insulin signaling. Akt activation alone accounted for ~25% of the variance in GLUT4, indicating that additional sources of variance exist. The Akt and GLUT4 responses were highly reproducible within the same cell, suggesting the variance is between cells (extrinsic) and not within cells (intrinsic). Generalized mechanistic models (supported by experimental observations) demonstrated that the correlation between the steady-state levels of two measured signaling processes decreases with increasing distance from each other and that intercellular variation in protein expression (as an example of extrinsic variance) is sufficient to account for the variance in and between Akt and GLUT4. Thus, the response of a population to insulin signaling is underpinned by considerable single-cell heterogeneity that is largely driven by variance in gene/protein expression between cells.

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