Enzymes

Question 1

What are enzymes?

Answer 1

Proteins which are biological catalysts

Question 2

What is an enzymes active site?

Answer 2

Part of an enzymes tertiary structure which is specific and complimentary to one substrate

Question 3

What does stereospecific mean?

Answer 3

The enzymes will only work on one enantiomer of a substrate

Question 4

What happens if the substrate doesn’t fit the active site?

Answer 4

The reaction won’t be catalysed

Question 5

What do enzyme inhibitors do?

Answer 5

They block the active site so the substrate can’t bind and no enzyme-substrate complexes are formed

Question 6

What happens if you increase the concentration of inhibitor?

Answer 6

it’ll take up most of the active sites and very little substrate will be able to get to the enzyme

Question 7

What happens if you increase the concentration of substate when you have an inhibitor?

Answer 7

more substrate will be able to bind to the active sites

Question 8

What is a practical application of inhibitors?

Answer 8

In drugs

Question 9

What is the issue with using inhibitors as drugs?

Answer 9

due to the specificity of the active sites, it takes a lot of time and effort to find a complimentary drug molecule and harder to find a chiral

Question 10

It usually takes trial and error to find an inhibitor drug but what are scientists doing to overcome this?

Answer 10

Using computer models fo the enzymes active site to predict how well potential drug molecules will interact with it as they can test hundreds of molecules before even doing any in the lab