Tuberculosis still represents the infectious disease with the highest fatality numbers. It is caused by mycobacteria, which mainly attack the lungs but can also affect almost any other organ. The fatty acid biosynthetic factory is an important target in the fight against this infectious bacterium. The fatty acid synthase (FAS) is considered one of the most complex cellular machines. The team led by Holger Stark and Ashwin Chari of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry has now discovered a protein that commands and controls FAS function. This finding not only opens up new therapeutic venues, particularly against tuberculosis. In biotechnological applications this new control unit enables the generation of tailor-made fatty acid synthases and specialized products that could only be synthesized from crude oil. This opens the prospects in ‘green biotechnology’.
Click here for original story, Researchers discover first protein that regulates fatty acid synthase
Source: Phys.org