BL4820 BASIC BIOCHEMICAL TECHNIQUES -- Lecture 3 - Enzyme Kinetics -- Expt 2 Part B
1. Introduction
Enzymes are biocatalysts. To serve this role in living systems, enzymes must have a specific site for binding the substrates of the reaction they catalyze and the enzyme must form a complex with its substrates. In honor of the first biochemists to describe enzyme kinetic phenomena, the complex of enzyme and substrate is called the Michaelis complex:
Figure 1. Formation of ES complex.
This complex can breakdown to form the free enzyme and substrate or go on to form product, which we will treat as an irreversible reaction:
Figure 2. Production of product and regeneration of Enzyme from ES complex.
We assume also that the formation of the ES complex is very rapid and that [ES] reaches a "steady state" or constant level in a few millisec. Hence, this type of enzyme kinetic analysis is know as steady state kinetic analysis.