Virtuelle (Nano) Welten PDB Molecule of the Month 90: Fatty Acid Synthase

Exploring the Structure

You can see the growing fatty acid chain in several structures of acyl carrier protein, the protein in bacteria and plants that carries the fatty acid from enzyme to enzyme. Acyl carrier protein has a special cofactor attached to a serine amino acid, called phosphopantetheine (colored with traditional atomic colors at the top). It is long and flexible and allows the fatty acid to snake its way into the enzyme active sites. When it is not attached to an enzyme, the carbon chain (colored magenta here) is sheltered inside a deep groove in the acyl carrier protein (the protein chain is colored tan here). Two structures are shown here: one with four carbon atoms added to the growing chain (on the left from PDB entry 1l0i), and one with ten carbon atoms (on the right from PDB entry 2fae). You can also find structures with other lengths in the PDB, as well as acyl carrier proteins with no fatty acids attached.

These illustrations were created with RasMol. You can create similar illustrations by clicking on the accession codes here and picking one of the options under Images and Visualization. To see some of the publications that I used for preparing this Molecule of the Month, click here. Also available are related entries in the PDB as determined by a keyword search on June 01, 2007 for 'fatty acid synthase'.