Animals have numerous paralogues, and yeast and bacteria also exhibit paralogues.
While some of the eukaryotic members of the family have been shown to increase the uptake of long chain fatty acids when expressed in mammalian cells, a Mycobacterium tuberculosis homologue increases the rate of uptake of long chain fatty acids when expressed in E. coli . It is not clear whether these proteins actually catalyze transport, or merely function to trap fatty acids in the cell cytoplasm as a result of covalent modification. Disruption of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae homologue to the murine fatty acid transport protein impairs uptake and growth on long-chain fatty acids. Deciphering the biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from the complete genome sequence. A family of fatty acid transporters conserved from mycobacterium to man.