BIOCHEMISTRY

Instructor: LE HONG PHU

Date of submission: October 12, 2022

HOMEWORK 6

Student's Information: 
Name  ID Student 

Mai Lê Chí Bảo  BTBTWE21068

TOPIC: The significant lessons that you can learn from the classes (05/10/22)
Hw: 
Enzymes are one of our important lessons this semester 1. Towards the end, the amount of
knowledge as well as the lesson will increase in difficulty. And last Wednesday was also a very
special and important day because we learned one of the most difficult parts of enzymes which
is kinetics.

In my opinion, Kinetics has always been one of the most challenging things to visualize because
it is so abstract. We always ask ourselves what is kinetics and how it will play an important role
in our body. More specifically, what is the profound relationship between kinetics and enzymes,
and does that relationship have a major influence on most biochemical reactions? Because this
is one of the extremely difficult parts of the Enzyme chapter, Professor Phu has given many
examples to help students easily imagine and understand. After a series of examples about
biochemical reactions and the effect of rate factors on biochemical reactions, Professor Phu
helped us understand how Kinetics is defined. We can derive basic kinetic properties such as
the study of kinetics focuses on the speeds of chemical processes. Furthermore,
thermodynamics may be used to determine whether a reaction will happen spontaneously for
any system that is responding. The reaction's kinetics show how quickly it actually proceeds. As
mentioned in previous lessons, most biochemical reactions take place at the cellular level of
living organisms. Moreover, the enzyme acts as a catalyst that can help the reaction achieve the
highest efficiency. And we also remember that catalysts significantly speed up a reaction's pace
while maintaining equilibrium.

Going deeper into the lesson, what impressed and overwhelmed me was the complexity of the
formulas. It is very flexibly modified from the original formula and to form each such formula
requires a lot of complicated experiments to be performed. One of the formulas that Professor
Phu introduced and explained very carefully to our class is the “Michaelis-Menten equation”. 
In this formula, we will focus mainly on 2 main quantities, which are Vmax and KM. When the
substrate has saturated all enzyme sites, the maximum reaction velocity, or Vmax, is attained.
This will occur when [S] >> KM, bringing [S]/([S] + KM]) closer to 1. Moreover, KM is equal to
the substrate concentration at which the reaction rate is half its maximum value. In other words,
if an enzyme has a small value of KM, it achieves its maximum catalytic efficiency at low
substrate concentrations. Thus, the smaller the value of KM, the more efficient is the catalyst.
The value of KM for an enzyme depends on the particular substrate. It also depends on the pH
of the solution and the temperature at which the reaction is carried out. For most enzymes, KM
lies between 10^-1 and 10^-7 M.

This is really one of the lessons that I find difficult and highly challenging. This is a lesson that
plays an extremely important role in the Enzyme chapter in particular and semester 1 in general.
The formulas used for the calculations are extremely complicated and the mechanics of the
increase and decrease are very complex and this makes me even more excited to learn more
about these things.