Enzyme assembly line pictured

摘要

Living cells contain many molecular machines that integrate and orchestrate essential processes. One of the most familiar is the ribosome, which polymerizes amino acids to form proteins. In the early 1990s, a radically different type of polymerizing assembly line was discovered: poly-ketide synthase (PKS) multi-enzymes, which make polyketide compounds, including many important antibiotics. Remarkably, these complexes use a different module of catalytic sites for each cycle of a chemical-chain extension. Efforts to understand these sophisticated catalysts have received a great boost from two studies in this issue from the same research group: Dutta et al.