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. 2018 Feb 13;8:2946. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-20920-1

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Schematic representation of the sialic acid metabolism pathway in eukaryotic cells. The key steps of the biosynthesis of sialic acid and its transfer and removal from sialoglycoconjugates is depicted (pink background). Cytosolic sialic acid molecules in eukaryotic cells, originate either from (1) exogenous sialyloglycoconjugates via the lysosome after Neu1 and SLC17A5 action or via an as yet unknown mechanism of uptake at the plasma membrane (blue background) or (2) from a cytosolic UDP-GlcNAc molecule biosynthesized in the hexosamine pathway (green background). Abbreviations used are indicated as follows: GNE: UDP-GlcNAc 2-epimerase/ManNAc kinase (the 2 enzymatic domains are fused in Deuterostoma); NANS: Neu5Ac-9-phosphate synthetase also known as N-acetylneuraminate lyase; NANP: Neu5Ac-9-phosphate phosphatase; CMAS: CMP-Sialic acid synthetase; STs: Golgi sialyltransferases; Neu1–4: sialidase 1–4; Sia: sialic acid; CMP: cytidine monophosphate; CTP: cytidine triphosphate; PEP: phosphoenolpyruvate; SLC17A5: sialin; SLC35A1: CMP-sialic acid transporter. Key steps in N-acetylneuraminate biosynthesis in Bacteria are indicated in grey characters.