Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 259

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 46 of the 46 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

X-ray structure of a mammalian stearoyl-CoA desaturase

Open access
Bai, Yonghong, McCoy, Jason G., Levin, Elena J., Sobrado, Pablo, Rajashankar, Kanagalaghatta R., Fox, Brian G., Zhou, Ming·2015·Nature

Abstract

Stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) is conserved in all eukaryotes and introduces the first double bond into saturated fatty acyl-CoAs. Because the monounsaturated products of SCD are key precursors of membrane phospholipids, cholesterol esters and triglycerides, SCD is pivotal in fatty acid metabolism. Humans have two SCD homologues (SCD1 and SCD5), while mice have four (SCD1–SCD4). SCD1-deficient mice do not become obese or diabetic when fed a high-fat diet because of improved lipid metabolic profiles and insulin sensitivity. Thus, SCD1 is a pharmacological target in the treatment of obesity, diabetes and other metabolic diseases. SCD1 is an integral membrane protein located in the endoplasmic reticulum, and catalyses the formation of a cis-double bond between the ninth and tenth carbons of stearoyl- or palmitoyl-CoA. The reaction requires molecular oxygen, which is activated by a di-iron centre, and cytochrome b5, which regenerates the di-iron centre. To understand better the structural basis of these characteristics of SCD function, here we crystallize and solve the structure of mouse SCD1 bound to stearoyl-CoA at 2.6 Å resolution. The structure shows a novel fold comprising four transmembrane helices capped by a cytosolic domain, and a plausible pathway for lateral substrate access and product egress. The acyl chain of the bound stearoyl-CoA is enclosed in a tunnel buried in the cytosolic domain, and the geometry of the tunnel and the conformation of the bound acyl chain provide a structural basis for the regioselectivity and stereospecificity of the desaturation reaction. The dimetal centre is coordinated by a unique spacial arrangement of nine conserved histidine residues that implies a potentially novel mechanism for oxygen activation. The structure also illustrates a possible route for electron transfer from cytochrome b5 to the di-iron centre.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/nature14549

Cites

46 of 46 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 46 references

Cited by

See all 259

Metadata

Authors
Bai, Y., McCoy, J. G., Levin, E. J., Sobrado, P., Rajashankar, K. R., Fox, B. G., & Zhou, M.
Venue
Nature
Published
2015-06-22
Volume
524
Issue
7564
Pages
252-256
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
OpenAlex
W1247621250
Cited by
259
References
46
FWCI
8.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: X-ray structure of a mammalian stearoyl-CoA desaturase. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nature14549
The paper
Bai, Y., McCoy, J. G., Levin, E. J., Sobrado, P., Rajashankar, K. R., Fox, B. G., & Zhou, M. (2015). X-ray structure of a mammalian stearoyl-CoA desaturase. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14549

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.