The inhibitory action of fatty acids on DNA polymerase beta

We found previously that long-chain fatty acids could inhibit eukaryotic DNA polymerase activities in vitro [1,2]. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the mode of this inhibition in greater detail. Among the C18 to C24 fatty acids examined, the strongest inhibitor was a C24 fatty acid, nervonic acid (NA), and the weakest was a C18 fatty acid, linoleic acid (LA). We analyzed the inhibitory effect of these two fatty acids and their modes of action. For DNA polymerase beta (pol. beta), NA acted by competing with both the substrate- and template-primer, but for DNA polymerase alpha (pol. alpha) or human immunodeficiency virus type 1 reverse transcriptase (HIV-1 reverse transcriptase or HIV-RT), NA acted non-competitively. NA-binding to pol. beta could be stopped with a non-ionic detergent, but the binding to pol. alpha or HIV-RT could not. The inhibition mode of LA showed the same characteristics, except that the minimum inhibitory dose of the longer chain was much lower. We also tested the effects of NA and LA using pol. beta and its proteolytic fragments, as described by Kumar et al. [3,4]. Both of the fatty acids were found to bind to the 8 kDa DNA-binding domain fragment, and to suppress binding to the template-primer DNA. We found that 10,000 times more of either fatty acid was required for it to bind to the 31 kDa catalytic domain or inhibit the DNA polymerase activity. The possible modes of inhibition by these long-chain fatty acids are discussed, based on the present findings.