Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Enzymes can be classified by two main criteria: either amino acid sequence similarity (and thus evolutionary relationship) or enzymatic activity. Enzyme activity. An enzyme's name is often derived from its substrate or the chemical reaction it catalyzes, with the word ending in -ase.
Increasing the substrate concentration increases the rate of reaction (enzyme activity). However, enzyme saturation limits reaction rates. An enzyme is saturated when the active sites of all the molecules are occupied most of the time. At the saturation point, the reaction will not speed up, no matter how much additional substrate is added.
The enzyme unit, or international unit for enzyme (symbol U, sometimes also IU) is a unit of enzyme's catalytic activity. [ 1 ] 1 U (μmol/min) is defined as the amount of the enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of one micro mole of substrate per minute under the specified conditions of the assay method .
Organisation of enzyme structure and lysozyme example. Binding sites in blue, catalytic site in red and peptidoglycan substrate in black. (In biology and biochemistry, the active site is the region of an enzyme where substrate molecules bind and undergo a chemical reaction.
A regulatory enzyme is an enzyme in a biochemical pathway which, through its responses to the presence of certain other biomolecules, regulates the pathway activity. This is usually done for pathways whose products may be needed in different amounts at different times, such as hormone production. Regulatory enzymes exist at high concentrations ...
Biosynthesis, i.e., chemical synthesis occurring in biological contexts, is a term most often referring to multi-step, enzyme-catalyzed processes where chemical substances absorbed as nutrients (or previously converted through biosynthesis) serve as enzyme substrates, with conversion by the living organism either into simpler or more complex ...
Enzyme catalysis is the increase in the rate of a process by an "enzyme", a biological molecule. Most enzymes are proteins, and most such processes are chemical reactions. Within the enzyme, generally catalysis occurs at a localized site, called the active site.
α-Amylase is an enzyme (EC 3.2.1.1; systematic name 4-α-D-glucan glucanohydrolase) that hydrolyses α bonds of large, α-linked polysaccharides, such as starch and glycogen, yielding shorter chains thereof, dextrins, and maltose, through the following biochemical process: [2]