DGAT

Acyl-CoA: diacylglycerol acyltransferase (DGAT) is an enzyme involved in the biosynthesis of triacylglycerol (TG) that catalyze the final step in the sn-glycerol-3-phosphate (G3P) pathway esterifying diacylglycerol (DG) to produce TG. With the development of techniques in genomics, bioinformatics, transgenics and protein purification, genes encoding two major types of DGAT have been identified, DGAT1 (10.62 kb with 17 exons) and DGAT2 (42.03 kb with 8 exons), which encode two DGAT enzymes with approximately 35% difference in length. Although the two DGAT enzymes have no sequence homology, they exhibit similar activities in the biosynthesis of TG. However, DGAT2 enzyme appears to be a more potent DGAT with a higher affinity towards its substrates than DGAT1 enzyme.