In the fatty acid biosynthesis of plants and bacteria, the acyl carrier protein (ACP) is known to sequester elongating products within its hydrophobic core, but this dynamic mechanism remains poorly understood. In this paper we exploit solvatochromic pantetheine probes attached to ACP that fluoresce when sequestered. Addition of a catalytic partner lures the cargo out of the ACP and into the active site of the enzyme, enhancing fluorescence to reveal the elusive chain-flipping mechanism. This activity is confirmed by demonstration of a dual solvatochromic-crosslinking probe and solution-phase NMR. The chain-flipping mechanism can be visualized by single molecule fluorescent techniques, demonstrating specificity between the Escherichia coli ACP and its ketoacyl synthase catalytic partner KASII.
Keywordssolvatochromism; acyl carrier protein; chain-flipping mechanism; fatty acid synthase; fatty acids Primary and secondary acetate metabolites are synthesized by dedicated fatty acid and polyketide synthases. Both families are subdivided in type I and type II architectures, based on whether they are encoded on one multidomain polypeptide chain or as separate proteins, respectively. These are often represented as molecular assembly lines with domains that perform chemistry on the growing metabolite while tethered to an acyl carrier protein (ACP), [1] which shuttles its cargo from one enzyme to the next. Although synthetic biologists have ambition to swap domains and modules between these synthases to create new molecular architectures, these efforts have been tempered by the discovery that both protein-substrate and protein-protein interactions play an important role in both iterative and