Fig. 1.

Chemical structure of the lipoylated amino-terminus of bacterial membrane-anchored lipoproteins. The lipoylation of the amino-terminal cysteinyl residue by a diacylglyceryl moiety via a thioether bond is a feature common to all known bacterial membrane lipoproteins. The amino group of the cysteinyl residue is blocked in certain lipoproteins by a third fatty acyl chain via an amide bond (Chambaud et al., 1999)