Biochemistry 4th Edition by Reginald Garrett, Charles Grisham

Exercise 16

Studying the structure of fatty acyl synthase
In the FAS megasynthase structures, the multiple functional sites must lie within reach of the ACP and its bound acyl group substrates. Examine the mammalian FAS structure (see Figure 24.11) and determine the distances between the various functional sites. You could approach this problem either by using a molecular modeling program (such as PyMol at www.pymol.org) or by consulting appropriate references (the following end-of-chapter reference is a good place to start: Maier, T., Jenni, S., and Ban, N., 2006. Science 311:1258-1262). You should convince yourself, with quantitative arguments, that the intersite distances can be traversed appropriately by the ACP group.