4.3: Enzyme Catalysis and Kinetics
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- 4.3.1: Introduction
- In this chapter, we look at the properties and mechanism of action of enzymes. These include allosteric change (induced fit, enzyme regulation), energetic events (changes in activation energy), and how enzymes work in open and closed (experimental) systems. Any catalyst, by definition, accelerates a chemical reaction. But enzymes and inorganic catalysts differ in important ways (blue and red in the table below).
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- 4.3.2: Enzymes
- By 1941, their studies correlating mutations with enzyme deficiencies in Neurospora crassa (bread mold) and Drosophila melanogaster led George Beadle and Edward Tatum to propose the one-gene/one-enzyme hypothesis in 1941. In 1958, they shared Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for this work.
Thumbnail: diagram showing the induced fit model in enzymes (Public Domain; LadyofHats ).