Water transport by the Na+/glucose cotransporter under isotonic conditions

Solute cotransport in the Na+/glucose cotransporter is directly coupled to significant water fluxes. The water fluxes are energized by the downhill fluxes of the other substrates by a mechanism within the protein itself. In the present paper we investigate the Na+/glucose cotransporter expressed in Xenopus oocytes. We present a method which allows short-term exposures to sugar under voltage clamp conditions. We demonstrate that water is cotransported with the solutes despite no osmotic differences between the external and intracellular solutions. There is a fixed ratio of 195:1 between the number of water molecules and the number of Na+ ions transported, equivalent to 390 water molecules per glucose molecule. Unstirred layer effects are ruled out on the basis of experiments on native oocytes incubated with the ionophores gramicidin D or nystatin.