Enzyme Kinetics Quotes

Enzymes catalyze all the reactions of life. They're what allow you to extract materials and energy from your environment and turn that into muscle and tissue and fat. That's all done by enzymes. They're pretty remarkable chemists - they're even better than Caltech chemists.

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

Enzymes are masters of chemistry. They evolved over billions of years to perform specific biological functions. They make complex materials with virtually no waste.

It was obvious-to me at any rate-that the answer was to why an enzyme is able to speed up a chemical reaction by as much as 10 million times. It had to do this by lowering the energy of activation-the energy of forming the activated complex. It could do this by forming strong bonds with the activated complex, but only weak bonds with the reactants or products.

Enzymologists usually study the initial rates of reactions measuring product formation as a function of substrate concentration or other variable. Cell biologists are more likely to want to know the effect of a change on the steady state behavior of a complex system.

I was also interested in formulating the path of chemical reactions.

My thesis was on kinetics studies with the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase. When that was finished, I was granted a British Council Fellowship to work under the supervision of Malcolm Dixon.

Enzymes - plainly the most important biotechnology of our era - already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures.