Nguyen Nam Long
Associate Professor
Department of Biochemistry
Tel: 66015299
Email: bchnnl@nus.edu.sg

What are your present research interests?

Nutrients play vital roles in health and disease. My laboratory is interested in identifying the novel nutritional transporters and characterizing their physiological functions. We contributed to the identification of physiological ligands for Mfsd2a, Mfsd2b, Spns1, Mfsd7c, Mfsd7b as lipid and metabolite transporters. We are also interested in understanding the impact of essential nutrients at the blood-brain barrier. The ultimate goal is to learn how these transporters work so that we can harness them for therapeutic development for treatment of human diseases.

What do you see as your future research directions?

There are over 450 membrane transporters in human cells. We will continue to reveal the physiological roles of the nutritional transporters in normal and pathological conditions. We are learning how to harness these transporters for treatment of Alzheimer’s and metabolic diseases.

Does your laboratory have a particularly strong research expertise?

We have developed platforms to identify ligands for transporters. We generated knockout mice to study the physiological impact of these transporters. Our strong expertise includes lipid biochemistry, metabolism, and animal physiology.

Recent Publications

1. †Hongwen Chen, †Hoa T.T. Ha, Nadia Elghobashi-Meinhardt, Nhung A. Le, Philip Schmiege, #Long N. Nguyen and #Xiaochun Li. Molecular basis of Spns1-mediated lysophospholipid transport from the lysosome. PNAS. In-press. December 2024. #co-corresponding author.
2. †,#Calame, D. G., †Wong, J. H., Panda, P., Nguyen, D. T., Leong, N. C. P., Sangermano, R., Patankar, S. G., Abdel-Hamid, M., AlAbdi, L., Safwat, S., Flannery, K. P., Dardas, Z., Fatih, J. M., Murali, C., Kannan, V., Lotze, T. E., Herman, I., Ammouri, F., Rezich, B., Efthymiou, S., Alavi, S., Murphy, D., Firoozfar, Z., Nasab, M. E., Bahreini, A., Ghasemi, M., Haridy, N. A., Goldouzi, H. R., Eghbal, F., Karimiani, E. G., Srinivasan, V. M., Gowda, V. K., Du, H., Jhangiani, S. N., Coban-Akdemir, Z., Marafi, D., Rodan, L., Isikay, S., Rosenfeld, J. A., Ramanathan, S., Staton, M., Oberg, K. C., Clark, R. D., Wenman, C., Loughlin, S., Saad, R., Ashraf, T., Male, A., Tadros, S., Boostani, R., Abdel-Salam, G. M. H., Zaki, M., Abdalla, E., Chiara Manzini, M., Pehlivan, D., Posey, J. E., Gibbs, R. A., Houlden, H., Alkuraya, F. S., Bujakowska, K., Maroofian, R., #Lupski, J. R. and #Nguyen, L. N. Biallelic variation in the choline and ethanolamine transporter FLVCR1 underlies a pleiotropic disease spectrum from adult neurodegeneration to severe developmental disorders. Genetics in Medicine. Oct 2024. †co-first author; #co-corresponding author.
3. †Keiken Ri, †Tsai-Hsuan Weng, †Ainara Claveras Cabezudo, Wiebke Jösting, Zhang Yu1, Andre Bazzone, Nancy C.P. Leong, Sonja Welsch, Raymond T. Doty, Gonca Gursu, Tiffany Jia Ying Lim, Sarah Luise Schmidt, Janis L. Abkowitz, #Gerhard Hummer, #Di Wu, #Long N Nguyen, #Schara Safarian. Structural basis of choline and ethanolamine transport by FLVCR1 and FLVCR2. Nature; May 2024. †co-first author; #co-corresponding author.
4. Hoa T.T. Ha, SiYi Liu, Xuan T.A. Nguyen, Linh K. Vo, Nancy C.P. Leong, Dat T. Nguyen, Shivaranjani Balamurugan, Pei Yen Lim, YaJun Wu, Eunju Seong, Toan Q. Nguyen, Jeongah Oh, Markus R. Wenk, Amaury Cazenave-Gassiot, Zuhal Yapici, Wei-Yi Ong, #Margit Burmeister, #Long N. Nguyen. Lack of SPNS1 results in accumulation of lysolipids and lysosomal storage disease in mouse models. JCI insight. March 2024. In-Press. #co-orresponding author.
5. *Xuan T.A. Nguyen, *Thanh Nha Uyen Le, Toan Q. Nguyen, Hoa Thi Thuy Ha, Anna Artati, Nancy C.P. Leong, Dat T. Nguyen, Pei Yen Lim, Adelia Vicanatalita Susanto, Huang Qianhui, Fam Ling, Leong Lo Ngah, Isabelle Bonne, Angela Lee, Jorge Granadillo, Catherine Gooch, Dejie Yu, Huang Hua, Tuck Wah Soong, Matthew Wook Chang, Markus R. Wenk, Jerzy Adamski, Amaury Cazenave-Gassiot, #Long N. Nguyen. MFSD7c functions as a transporter of choline at the blood-brain barrier. Cell Research. March 2024. #corresponding author.
6. *Yaning Duan, *Nancy C.P. Leong, Jing Zhao, Yu Zhang, Dat T. Nguyen, Hoa T.T. Ha, Na Wang, Ruixue Xia, Zhenmei Xu, Zhengxiong Ma, Yu Qian, Han Yin, Xinyan Zhu, Yu Xia, #Long N. Nguyen, #Yuanzheng He. Structural basis of Sphingosine-1-phosphate transport via human SPNS2. Cell Research. March 2024. #co-corresponding author.