Loss of Sugar Detection by GLUT2 Affects Glucose Homeostasis in Mice

International audienceBACKGROUND: Mammals must sense the amount of sugar available to them and respond appropriately. For many years attention has focused on intracellular glucose sensing derived from glucose metabolism. Here, we studied the detection of extracellular glucose concentrations in vivo by invalidating the transduction pathway downstream from the transporter-detector GLUT2 and measured the physiological impact of this pathway. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We produced mice that ubiquitously express the largest cytoplasmic loop of GLUT2, blocking glucose-mediated gene expression in vitro without affecting glucose metabolism. Impairment of GLUT2-mediated sugar detection transiently protected transgenic mice against starvation and streptozotocin-induced diabetes, suggesting that both low- and high-glucose concentrations were not detected. Transgenic mice favored lipid oxidation, and oral glucose was slowly cleared from blood due to low insulin production, despite massive urinary glucose excretion. Kidney adaptation was characterized by a lower rate of glucose reabsorption, whereas pancreatic adaptation was associated with a larger number of small islets. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Molecular invalidation of sugar sensing in GLUT2-loop transgenic mice changed multiple aspects of glucose homeostasis, highlighting by a top-down approach, the role of membrane glucose receptors as potential therapeutic targets

Using role-play simulation to study entrepreneurship from a process perspective : theoretical groundings and first empirical insights

Entrepreneurship needs more than other disciplines taught at universities permanent interchange with related sciences and practice. Thus, The Entrepreneurship – Innovation – Marketing Interface was the title of a symposium held at the University of Karlsruhe in October 2005 (for the second time after a first successful meeting two years before) to foster cross-disciplinary activities that have connections with entrepreneurship and to provide a forum for the presentation of ideas and experiences that practitioners and researchers could interchange. This volume contains articles from the entrepreneurship – innovation – marketing interface that have been grouped into the following chapters: Plenary Talks, Entrepreneurial Marketing & Market Orientation, Innovation Aspects. Technology & Spin- Offs, Local Leadership & Regional/Global Development, Entrepreneurial Learning, Putting Entrepreneurial Ideas into Practice, and Oral Presentations by Practitioners

Developing characteristics of an intrapreneurship-supportive culture

Intrapreneurship is a topic with a high attraction equally to many scholars and managers in companies of any size nowadays. It is defined as entrepreneurship within existing organizations and became a subject of interest because of its effects on organizational revitalization, innovation, and the creation of new business activity. Intrapreneurship is especially important in the context of industrial R&D to develop radical product innovation as the initial phases to create new domains of business that are unrelated to the current mainstream activity of the established firm. This paper aims at developing characteristics of an intrapreneurship-supportive culture in order to facilitate intrapreneurship over time – that is, to make it happen again and again. An emergent body of literature stresses that entrepreneurial and innovating behaviours of both individuals and firms depend on cultural factors. However, still it is not fully clear how to define, build, and measure such culture that supports intrapreneurship in industrial R&D. Therefore, an extensive literature investigation has been conducted in order to identify relevant culture-bound factors that support intrapreneurship in industrial R&D. In total, 101 scientific but also practice-oriented contributions in the domain of innovation, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship have been studied. Guided by theory on national, professional, and corporate culture, a six-dimensional framework of intrapreneurship-supportive culture has been conceptualized. Keywords: intrapreneurship, innovation, national culture, professional culture, corporate culture