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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. The rate of reaction of many chemical reactions shows a linear response as function of the concentration of substrate molecules.
Biochemical reactions involving a single substrate are often assumed to follow Michaelis–Menten kinetics, without regard to the model's underlying assumptions. Only a small proportion of enzyme-catalysed reactions have just one substrate, but the equation still often applies if only one substrate concentration is varied.
The rate of a reaction is the concentration of substrate disappearing (or product produced) per unit time (mol L −1 s −1). The % purity is 100% × (specific activity of enzyme sample / specific activity of pure enzyme). The impure sample has lower specific activity because some of the mass is not actually enzyme.
Substrate presentation; A substrate (purple rectangle) is shown sequestered into a lipid domain (green lipids). The substrate's translocation to the disordered region (grey lipids) presents it to its enzyme (blue oval) where it is hydrolyzed. In molecular biology, substrate presentation is a biological process that activates a protein.
Enzymes catalyze chemical reactions involving the substrate(s). In the case of a single substrate, the substrate bonds with the enzyme active site, and an enzyme-substrate complex is formed. The substrate is transformed into one or more products, which are then released from the active site. The active site is then free to accept another ...
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 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.
The amount of substrate needed to achieve a given rate of reaction is also important. This is given by the Michaelis–Menten constant (K m), which is the substrate concentration required for an enzyme to reach one-half its maximum reaction rate; generally, each enzyme has a characteristic K M for a given substrate.