Background
Alcohol dehydrogenase,consisting of several homo- and heterodimers of alpha, beta, and
gamma subunits, exhibits high activity for ethanol oxidation and plays a major role in
ethanol catabolism.Members of this enzyme family metabolize a wide variety of substrates,
including ethanol, retinol, other aliphatic alcohols, hydroxysteroids, and lipid peroxidation
products. Three genes encoding alpha, beta and gamma subunits are tandemly organized in
a genomic segment as a gene cluster.
