Acetyl-CoA (75520-41-1) is an essential cofactor for cellular metabolism, being an ‘activated acetate’ that shuttles its moieties back and forth during anabolic, catabolic, and metabolic processes involving fundamental molecules: fatty acids, amino acids, glucose, and ATP. In the laboratory, it can be used as a substrate in chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) transcription reporter assays or in histone acetyltransferase (HAT) assays in epigenetics research.