Factors That Affect Enzyme Activity

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FACTORS THAT AFFECT ENZYME ACTIVITY

Enzymes are biological catalysts, which speed up the rate of reactions. These catalysts are essential to life as most biological reactions would take place too slowly for life to exist. For example the oxidation of glucose to CO2 and H2O is relatively quick and proceeds almost completely in the direction stated. However, without enzymes, glucose oxidation occurs too slowly at physiological temperatures that the rate is essentially immeasurable. The increase in rate of reaction achieved by the enzymes, depending on the enzyme and reaction, range from a minimum of about a million to as much as a trillion times faster than the un-catalyzed reaction at equivalent concentrations and temperatures. Another significant advantage of enzymes is the fact that they are specific, they only catalyse specific substrates, depending on their shape and the enzymes active site shape. There are substrate concentration, pH, enzyme concentration, temperature, and the presence of inhibitors.

Substrate Concentration

At very low substrate concentration, collisions between enzyme and substrate molecules are infrequent, due to the decrease in the number of substrate molecules for the enzymes to catalyse, and therefore the reaction proceeds slowly. As the substrate concentration increases, the reaction