Aldehyde dehydrogenase 8 family, member A1 also known as ALDH8A1 is an enzyme

Enzyme

Enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. In enzymatic reactions, the molecules at the beginning of the process, called substrates, are converted into different molecules, called products. Almost all chemical reactions in a biological cell need enzymes in order to occur at rates...

 that in humans is encoded by the ALDH8A1 gene

Gene

A gene is a molecular unit of heredity of a living organism. It is a name given to some stretches of DNA and RNA that code for a type of protein or for an RNA chain that has a function in the organism. Living beings depend on genes, as they specify all proteins and functional RNA chains...

.

Function

This protein belongs to the aldehyde dehydrogenase

Aldehyde dehydrogenase

Aldehyde dehydrogenases are a group of enzymes that catalyse the oxidation of aldehydes.- Function :Aldehyde dehydrogenase is a polymorphic enzyme responsible for the oxidation of aldehydes to carboxylic acids, which leave the liver and are metabolized by the body’s muscle and heart...

 family of proteins. It plays a role in a pathway of 9-cis-retinoic acid

Retinoic acid

Retinoic acid is a metabolite of vitamin A that mediates the functions of vitamin A required for growth and development. Retinoic acid is required in chordate animals which includes all higher animals from fishes to humans...

 biosynthesis

Biosynthesis

Biosynthesis is an enzyme-catalyzed process in cells of living organisms by which substrates are converted to more complex products. The biosynthesis process often consists of several enzymatic steps in which the product of one step is used as substrate in the following step...

 in vivo. This enzyme converts 9-cis-retinal

Retinal

Retinal, also called retinaldehyde or vitamin A aldehyde, is one of the many forms of vitamin A . Retinal is a polyene chromophore, and bound to proteins called opsins, is the chemical basis of animal vision...

 into the retinoid X receptor

Retinoid X receptor

The retinoid X receptor is a type of nuclear receptor that is activated by 9-cis retinoic acid. There are three retinoic X receptors : RXR-alpha, RXR-beta, and RXR-gamma, encoded by the , , genes, respectively....

ligand 9-cis-retinoic acid, and has approximately 40-fold higher activity with 9-cis-retinal than with all-trans-retinal. Therefore, it is the first known aldehyde dehydrogenase to show a preference for 9-cis-retinal relative to all-trans-retinal. Two transcript variants encoding distinct isoforms have been identified for this gene.