American scientists have discovered a method to change the function of an enzyme that is crucial to fat production in the body. A paper by researchers from Iowa State University was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists initially investigated the cellular and molecular mechanisms that cause aging in animals. To that end, they studied fatty acid synthase, an enzyme that plays a role in de novo lipogenesis, that is, converting excess dietary carbohydrates into fat. Typically, fatty acid synthase levels rise and fall depending on the cellular needs and diet of the animal.

The scientists noticed that early in the development of the fruit fly, lipogenesis de novo increases without a concomitant increase in fatty acid synthase expression. In other words, the amount of the enzyme remained the same, but the productivity changed. This indicated that some other factor must act. It turned out that already after synthase creation its function could be changed by posttranslational modification. In this case, it was due to acetylation, which affected one of the 2,540 amino acids that make up the synthase. As a result, its efficiency of fat production changed.

The authors hope that this method of synthase modification will help treat obesity in humans. In addition, increased levels of de novo lipogenesis are associated with cancer, so controlling it with the identified mechanism could lead to the creation of a new type of therapy. It is not known whether similar processes occur in human cells, but fruit flies were chosen as a model animal precisely because of some genetic similarity to humans.