preview

The Importance Of A Chemical Reaction With Enzymes

Decent Essays
Open Document

Background: In this lab, we will be observing a chemical reaction dealing with enzymes. You may ask, what are enzymes? Enzymes are proteins produced by living cells. For example, you have enzymes in your digestive system to help you break down food. Without enzymes, organisms will not be able to survive. Enzymes act as catalyst in biochemical reactions and catalyst speeds up the reaction by lowering the amount of activation energy. Activation energy is required for reactants to react into products. Although enzymes are essential, substrate plays an crucial role as well. The substrate and enzyme bind together on the active site of the enzyme, like a key to a lock. Each substrate has its own specific shape and structure. The active site of …show more content…

Overly basic solution will cause amino acid chains to gain too much H+, causing the enzyme to be disrupted. Thirdly, the temperature can become an issue. Increase of temperature may be able to speed up the reaction because the molecules have more kinetic energy. However, a temperature optimum can be reacted, where kinetic energy and water molecules move so rapidly that enzyme molecule begin to disrupt. To avoid denaturation, temperature should be maintained correctly. Lastly, the activations and inhibitors are responsible for the increase and decrease for reaction rate. An activator increases the reaction rate and inhibitor decreases it. Some chemicals, such as potassium cyanide, act as inhibitors and interfere with the active site of enzymes. Those are the four crucial external impact that needs to be watched out for.
For our starters, we will be using catalase as our enzyme, an enzyme that has four polypeptides chains with each composed of hundreds of amino acids. Catalase is used to prevent the toxicity of hydrogen peroxide formed by byproducts. The primary reaction for this lab will be the decomposition of H2O2 into oxygen and water. We will add in catalase because it is very slow to react. One of our main objective for this lab is to calculate reaction rate due to the catalase. Although we cannot fully determine how much water and oxygen is produced in this experiment, we can definitely determine

Get Access