American oil palm (Elaeis oleifera) is an important source of dietary oil that could fulfill the increasing worldwide demand for cooking oil. Therefore, improving its production is crucial and could be realized through breeding and genetic engineering approaches aiming to obtain high-yielding varieties with improved oil content and quality. The fatty acid composition and particularly the oleic/linoleic acid ratio are major factors influencing oil quality. Our work focused on a fatty acid desaturase (FAD) enzyme involved in the desaturation and conversion of oleic acid to linoleic acid. Following the in silico identification and annotation of Elaeis oleifera FAD2, its molecular and structural features characterization was performed to better understand the mechanistic bases of its enzymatic activity. EoFAD2 is 1173 nucleotides long and encodes a protein of 390 amino acids that shares similarities with other FADs. Interestingly, the phylogenetic study showed three distinguished groups where EoFAD2 clustered among monocotyledonous taxa. EoFAD2 is a membrane-bound protein with five transmembrane domains presumably located in the endoplasmic reticulum. The homodimer organization model of EoFAD2 enzyme and substrates and respective substrate-binding residues were predicted and described. Moreover, the comparison between 24 FAD2 sequences from different species generated two interesting single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with the oleic/linoleic acid contents.
Keywords: FAD2; SNP; fatty acids; in silico annotation; oil palm; oleic/linoleic acid ratio; structural modeling.