What is Enzyme?

What is enzyme? What are enzymes?
Enzymes are proteins that are also biological catalysts

Some of the characteristics of enzymes:

• They are proteins
• They are biological catalysts
• Catalysts are substances that are used to speed up the rates of chemical reactions by lowering the activation energy. They are not changed at the end of the reaction
• Enzymes will remain unchanged during a reaction
• Enzymes of substrate specific
• Substrates are substances that typically apart of the starting materials of a reaction. They are what enzymes act upon.
• The substrate binds onto the active site of the enzyme that is specific to the substrate.
• Enzymatic activity can be affected by different factors
• Temperature
• Enzymes tend to move faster when there is an increase in temperature, until an optimum temperature is reached for an enzyme. Above the optimum temperature, the enzyme will start to denature
• At decreasing temperatures, the molecules in a chemical reaction will move slowly. This will cause fewer collisions between the enzyme and substrate molecules.
• pH level
• The structure of the enzymes can often become disrupted by the level of Hydrogen ions.
• Enzyme concentration
• Substrate concentration
• Presence of inhibitors or activators
• Competitive inhibition: an inhibitor competes with the substrate for the active site of an enzyme
• Allosteric inhibition: inhibitors do not compete for the active site, but rather a different region of an enzyme protein.

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