Ever since the late 19th century, physicists have known about a counterintuitive property of some electric circuits called negative resistance. Typically, increasing the voltage in a circuit causes the electric current to ...
Researchers have developed the first fully functional biofuel cell whose biocatalysts (enzymes that play a critical role in power generation) directly self-assemble onto the electrodes. In about 5 minutes, enzyme-nanoparticle ...
Nanozymes are catalytic nanomaterials with enzyme-like characteristics that have attracted enormous recent research interest. The catalytic nanomaterials offer unique advantages of low cost, high stability, tunable catalytic ...
Researchers from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) at Meta AI have published a paper in the journal Science detailing a machine-learning-created database of 617 million predicted protein structures. The ESMFold language model described ...
Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create ...
Biochemistry
Mar 8, 2023
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41992
Researchers at the Center for RNA Research, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), in Seoul, have published a study with critical new insights into the structure and function of the Dicer enzyme. Dicer is an enzyme required ...
For the very first time, a study led by Julian Chen and his group in Arizona State University's School of Molecular Sciences and the Biodesign Institute's Center for the Mechanism of Evolution, has discovered an unprecedented ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Oct 3, 2022
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2302
Every moment in our bodies' cells, countless activities vital to life occur thanks to enzymes. These special proteins act as catalysts by accelerating the pace and improving the selectivity of chemical reactions without undergoing ...
Biochemistry
Jul 28, 2022
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418
Human saliva may contain an enzyme which can decompose the plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Researchers found the promising enzyme, a hydrolase, in a database containing human metagenome samples. As they report in ...
Biochemistry
Jun 29, 2022
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691
A new artificial enzyme has shown it can chew through lignin, the tough polymer that helps woody plants hold their shape. Lignin also stores tremendous potential for renewable energy and materials.
Materials Science
May 31, 2022
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903
Enzymes are biomolecules that catalyze (i.e., increase the rates of) chemical reactions. Nearly all known enzymes are proteins. However, certain RNA molecules can be effective biocatalysts too. These RNA molecules have come to be known as ribozymes. In enzymatic reactions, the molecules at the beginning of the process are called substrates, and the enzyme converts them into different molecules, called the products. Almost all processes in a biological cell need enzymes to occur at significant rates. Since enzymes are selective for their substrates and speed up only a few reactions from among many possibilities, the set of enzymes made in a cell determines which metabolic pathways occur in that cell.
Like all catalysts, enzymes work by lowering the activation energy (Ea or ΔG‡) for a reaction, thus dramatically increasing the rate of the reaction. Most enzyme reaction rates are millions of times faster than those of comparable un-catalyzed reactions. As with all catalysts, enzymes are not consumed by the reactions they catalyze, nor do they alter the equilibrium of these reactions. However, enzymes do differ from most other catalysts by being much more specific. Enzymes are known to catalyze about 4,000 biochemical reactions. A few RNA molecules called ribozymes catalyze reactions, with an important example being some parts of the ribosome. Synthetic molecules called artificial enzymes also display enzyme-like catalysis.
Enzyme activity can be affected by other molecules. Inhibitors are molecules that decrease enzyme activity; activators are molecules that increase activity. Many drugs and poisons are enzyme inhibitors. Activity is also affected by temperature, chemical environment (e.g., pH), and the concentration of substrate. Some enzymes are used commercially, for example, in the synthesis of antibiotics. In addition, some household products use enzymes to speed up biochemical reactions (e.g., enzymes in biological washing powders break down protein or fat stains on clothes; enzymes in meat tenderizers break down proteins, making the meat easier to chew).
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