What Causes Chemical Reactions?
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What causes chemical reactions? Perhaps we should ask what accelerates them. Catalysts are the accelerators and they remain unchanged during the acceleration. Enzymes are the organic type of catalysts, meaning they are the catalysts that occur within biological environments.
Most enzymes are proteins and they are polymerized (many repeating subunits brought together) into complex and detailed shapes. Some examples of enzymes are:
ATP synthase- this is the producer of the ATP molecules that supply energy to your cells. This is in constant use, generating 100 ATP molecules every second.
Ribonuclease- this catalyzes the breakdown of RNA into smaller parts.
Trypsin- this breaks down proteins in your small intestine.
Pepsin- this is made from the stomach and breaks down food proteins.
On the other hand, inorganic catalysts would be the non-enzymatic expeditors of chemical reactions that occur outside of biosystems and have no structural changes after doing their job. They include elemental metals such as palladium, platinum, iron, potassium permanganate, and vanadium oxide, etc. They are stubborn, unable to be forced out of shape, and not regulatable.
Unlike inorganic catalysts, enzymes can engage in allosteric change. Enzymes are specific due to the pliability of their active site that allows metabolites to bind to them and cause conformational changes that either accelerate or decelerate the catalytic rate of reaction, which has a strong and integral relationship with the status of biochemical pathways.
The different functions of your cells are characterized by the 3,000 different enzymes per cell that cause all cells to have overlapping sets of enzymes.
You likely never think about the biochemical reactions that take place in your household products, but it is happening because of the enzymes that are now included in spot removers and detergents where they digest stains caused by fats and pigmented proteins. Enzymes are included in meat tenderizers to hydrolyze (breakdown by reaction with water) animal proteins into smaller peptides. Furthermore, biochemical reactions really could not exist without enzyme catalysis. Your mouth, stomach, small intestines, and every chemical reaction inside your cells would not be the same without enzyme catalysis.
Allosteric change- altering the shape and activity of a protein by combining with another substance.
Ribozymes- RNA enzymes that speed up chemical reactions. After the first discovery of ribozymes in the 1980’s, many scientists believe that they are the leftovers from the ancient world that predated the evolution of proteins. They can be located in the ribosome where they combine amino acids to make protein chains.
Neurospora crassa- this is a type of red bread mold that is easy to grow and makes genetic analysis easy for scientists in their studies on biological phenomena.
Drosophila melanogaster- a species of fly often studied by scientists in laboratories due to its rapid life cycle and simple genetics with only four pairs of chromosomes.
one-gene/one-polypeptide hypothesis- the idea that each gene encodes for one enzyme, which traces back to experiments done by George Beadle and Edward Tatum who used common bread mold to make connections between genes and metabolic enzymes. Important updates have been made since those 1940’s experiments. It has been found that some genes can encode non-enzymatic proteins. Some genes can encode just a distinct component of a protein and not the entire protein. Some genes do not encode polypeptides.
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