UC Irvine

Protein·protein interactions, which often involve interactions among an acyl carrier protein (ACP) and ACP partner enzymes, are important for coordinating polyketide biosynthesis. However, the nature of such interactions is not well understood, especially in the fungal nonreducing polyketide synthases (NR-PKSs) that biosynthesize toxic and pharmaceutically important polyketides. Here, we employ mechanism-based crosslinkers to successfully probe ACP and ketosynthase (KS) domain interactions in NR-PKSs. We found that crosslinking efficiency is closely correlated with the strength of ACP·KS interactions and that KS demonstrates strong starter unit selectivity. We further identified positively charged surface residues by KS mutagenesis, which mediates key interactions with the negatively charged ACP surface. Such complementary/matching contact pairs can serve as "adapter surfaces" for future efforts to generate new polyketides using NR-PKSs.