Uroporphyrinogen Decarboxylase (URO-D; EC 4.1.1.37), the fifth enzyme of the heme biosynthetic pathway, is required for the production of heme, vitamin B12, siroheme, and chlorophyll precursors. URO-D catalyzes the sequential decarboxylation of the four acetate side chains on the pyrrole groups of uroporphyrinogen to produce coproporphyrinogen. URO-D is a stable homodimer with the active site clefts of the two subunits adjacent to each other. It has been hypothesized that the two catalytic centers interact functionally, perhaps by shuttling of reaction intermediates between subunits. We tested this hypothesis by construction of a single chain protein (scURO-D) in which the two subunits were connected by a flexible linker. The crystal structure of this protein was shown to be superimposible with wild-type activity and have comparable catalytic activity. Mutations that impaired one or the other of the two active sites of scURO-D resulted in approximately half of wild-type activity. The distribution of reaction intermediates was the same for mutant and wild-type sequences, and was unaltered in a competition experiment using the I and III isomer substrates. These observations indicate that communication between active sites is not required for enzyme function, and suggest that the dimeric structure of URO-D is required to achieve conformational stability and create a large active site cleft.