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Enzyme kinetics is the study of the rates of enzyme-catalysed chemical reactions. In enzyme kinetics, the reaction rate is measured and the effects of varying the conditions of the reaction are investigated.
Enzymes act on small molecules called substrates, which an enzyme converts into products. Almost all metabolic processes in the cell need enzyme catalysis in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life. The study of how fast an enzyme can transform a substrate into a product is called enzyme kinetics.
Curve of the Michaelis–Menten equation labelled in accordance with IUBMB recommendations. In biochemistry, Michaelis–Menten kinetics, named after Leonor Michaelis and Maud Menten, is the simplest case of enzyme kinetics, applied to enzyme-catalysed reactions of one substrate and one product.
In enzymology, the turnover number (k cat) is defined as the limiting number of chemical conversions of substrate molecules per second that a single active site will execute for a given enzyme concentration [E T] for enzymes with two or more active sites. [1] For enzymes with a single active site, k cat is referred to as the catalytic constant. [2]
A comparison of specificity constants can also be used as a measure of the preference of an enzyme for different substrates (i.e., substrate specificity). The higher the specificity constant, the more the enzyme "prefers" that substrate. [1] The following equation, known as the Michaelis–Menten model, is used to describe the kinetics of enzymes:
The enzyme-driven reaction can be conceptualized as the binding of an enzyme E with the substrate S to form an intermediate complex C, which releases the reaction product P and the unchanged enzyme E. During the metabolic consumption of S, biomass B is produced, which synthesizes the enzyme, thus feeding back to the chemical reaction.
The rate of the enzyme-catalysed reaction is limited by diffusion and so the enzyme 'processes' the substrate well before it encounters another molecule. [1] Some enzymes operate with kinetics which are faster than diffusion rates, which would seem to be impossible. Several mechanisms have been invoked to explain this phenomenon.
The enzyme involved in this reaction is called invertase, and it is the enzyme the kinetics of which have been supported by Michaelis and Menten to be revolutionary for the kinetics of other enzymes. While expressing the rate of the reaction studied, they derived an equation that described the rate in a way which suggested that it is mostly ...