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Fatty Acid Synthase: Structure, Function, and Regulation

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Macromolecular Protein Complexes IV

Part of the book series: Subcellular Biochemistry ((SCBI,volume 99))

Abstract

Fatty acid (FA) biosynthesis plays a central role in the metabolism of living cells as building blocks of biological membranes, energy reserves of the cell, and precursors to second messenger molecules. In keeping with its central metabolic role, FA biosynthesis impacts several cellular functions and its misfunction is linked to disease, such as cancer, obesity, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Cellular FA biosynthesis is conducted by fatty acid synthases (FAS). All FAS enzymes catalyze similar biosynthetic reactions, but the functional architectures adopted by these cellular catalysts can differ substantially. This variability in FAS structure amongst various organisms and the essential role played by FA biosynthetic pathways makes this metabolic route a valuable target for the development of antibiotics. Beyond cellular FA biosynthesis, the quest for renewable energy sources has piqued interest in FA biosynthetic pathway engineering to generate biofuels and fatty acid derived chemicals. For these applications, based on FA biosynthetic pathways, to succeed, detailed metabolic, functional and structural insights into FAS are required, along with an intimate knowledge into the regulation of FAS. In this review, we summarize our present knowledge about the functional, structural, and regulatory aspects of FAS.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Max-Planck Society for continued financial support. We further apologize to our many colleagues that we did not cite due to length constraints. Figures were created with Biorender.com and rendered using UCSF Chimera X (Goddard et al. 2018) or Pymol (Schrödinger 2015).

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Correspondence to Ashwin Chari .

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Günenc, A.N., Graf, B., Stark, H., Chari, A. (2022). Fatty Acid Synthase: Structure, Function, and Regulation. In: Harris, J.R., Marles-Wright, J. (eds) Macromolecular Protein Complexes IV. Subcellular Biochemistry, vol 99. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00793-4_1

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