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In biochemistry, a rate-limiting step is a reaction step that controls the rate of a series of biochemical reactions. [1] [2] The statement is, however, a misunderstanding of how a sequence of enzyme-catalyzed reaction steps operate. Rather than a single step controlling the rate, it has been discovered that multiple steps control the rate.
The limiting reagent (or limiting reactant or limiting agent) in a chemical reaction is a reactant that is totally consumed when the chemical reaction is completed. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The amount of product formed is limited by this reagent, since the reaction cannot continue without it.
As an example, consider the gas-phase reaction NO 2 + CO → NO + CO 2.If this reaction occurred in a single step, its reaction rate (r) would be proportional to the rate of collisions between NO 2 and CO molecules: r = k[NO 2][CO], where k is the reaction rate constant, and square brackets indicate a molar concentration.
To find the limiting reagent and the mass of HCl produced by the reaction, we change the above amounts by a factor of 90/324.41 and obtain the following amounts: 90.00 g FeCl 3, 28.37 g H 2 S, 57.67 g Fe 2 S 3, 60.69 g HCl. The limiting reactant (or reagent) is FeCl 3, since all 90.00 g of it is used up while only 28.37 g H 2 S are consumed.
The process of chemical reaction can be considered as involving the diffusion of reactants until they encounter each other in the right stoichiometry and form an activated complex which can form the product species. The observed rate of chemical reactions is, generally speaking, the rate of the slowest or "rate determining" step.
Although these mechanisms are often a complex series of steps, there is typically one rate-determining step that determines the overall kinetics. This rate-determining step may be a chemical reaction or a conformational change of the enzyme or substrates, such as those involved in the release of product(s) from the enzyme.
To address such a paradox, Kuo-Chen Chou and his co-workers proposed a model by taking into account the spatial factor and force field factor between the enzyme and its substrate and found that the upper limit could reach 10 10 M −1 s −1, [6] [7] [8] and can be used to explain some surprisingly high reaction rates in molecular biology. [5 ...
Hot start PCR is a method which prevents DNA polymerase extension at lower temperature to prevent non-specific binding to minimise yield loss. Hot start PCR reduces the amount of non-specific binding through limiting reagents until the heating steps of PCR – limit the reaction early by limiting Taq DNA polymerase in a reaction.