The process of transferring lipoic acid to proteins is a two-step process. The first step is the activation of lipoic acid by lipoate-activating enzyme to form lipoyl-AMP. For the second step, the protein encoded by this gene transfers the lipoyl moiety to apoproteins. Alternative splicing in the 5' UTR of this gene results in five transcript variants that encode the same protein. [provided by RefSeq]
