• Question: What does 2-deoxyglucose actually do i tried looking it up but it didn't really say much will u answer this I am REALLY curious!

    Asked by crazy to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 14 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @crazy
      I’d not heard of this before, so I’ve looked it up too. I agree that the wikpedia page is pretty confusing.
      From what I can gather, it’s a type of glucose (a fancy word for sugar) which can’t be broken down in to anything else. Because of this it has a couple of uses in biology.

      You can ‘tag’ it with something (radioactive stains for example) and then inject it in to people (or animals) so you can follow where it goes, and see how the person is distributing sugars (and therefore energy use) about their bodies.

      Also, it has a property which means if it is taken in to a cell, it will stop that cell growing. Because of this it has been suggested that it could be used to help stop tumours from growing, although at the moment I don’t think it’s understood HOW it stops cells growing, so it’s in trials at the moment to try and find out more about it.

      I hope this helps, I’m afraid I don’t know how accurate what I’ve said is, but this is what I’ve been able to find out from a google search (even scientists do this for things we’re not sure about 🙂 )

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