A Practical to Determine the Effect of Temperature Change on the Operation of Bacterial Amylase
Planning:
The object of this experiment is to determine the effect of temperature change on the operation of bacterial amylase. Bacterial amylase is an enzyme found and used in bacterial digestive processes which breaks down starch to maltose. Starch is a polysaccharide thus bacterial amylase catalyses the hydrolysis of the 1-4 glycosydic bonds in order to form the disaccharide maltose.
There are a number of variables which affect the efficiency of the bacterial amylase. A very high or very low pH may denature the bacterial amylase due to the alteration of the tertiary structure of the bacterial amylase, changing the ‘shape’ of the bacterial amylases active site preventing the starch from binding to the active site in order to form an enzyme-substrate complex and thus degrade the starch into maltose, the pH will be controlled with the introduction of a pH buffer into each test tube before the experiment is started in order to keep the pH constant at 7, keeping it a fair test. Temperature also plays a role in the efficiency of bacterial amylase because although increasing the temperature does indeed increase the rate of reaction, due to the increased movement of the particles and more possible collisions with the right activation energy, it may also denature the bacterial amylase if there is even a slight increase above the optimum temperature because high temperatures, like extreme pH’s, will alter the tertiary structure of the bacterial amylase preventing starch from binding with the bacterial enzyme and thus preventing the degradation of the starch. The volume of the various solutions would need to be kept constant as if there is more starch in one test tube than another, then it might take longer to break down all of the starch into maltose, likewise if there was more bacterial amylase in one test tube than another the reaction may take place faster.
