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Abstract

Metabolons are a specific type of transient multi-protein complex of sequential enzymes which mediate substrate channeling. They differ from multi-enzyme complexes in that they are dynamic rather than permanent and as such have considerably lower dissociation constants. Despite the fact that a huge number of metabolons have been claimed to exist in plants most of these claims are erroneous since only a handful of these have been proven to channel metabolites. We believe that physical protein- protein interactions between consecutive enzymes of a pathway should rather be called enzyme-enzyme assemblies. In this review we describe how metabolons are generally assembled by transient interaction and held together both by structural elements and non-covalent interactions. Experimental evidence for their existence comes from protein-protein interaction studies