Complete the Preparation page before laboratory. Even the simplest organism is powered by thousands of chemical reactions, participating in a complex, interconnected web of chemical activity. On their own, most of these reactions occur with rates so slow as to seem inconsistent with life.
Enzymes are a subclass of biopolymers called proteins.
They consist of very long molecules called polypeptides, which are formed by stringing amino acids together. Needless to say, the structures and stereochemistries of these macromolecules are very complex. The enzyme, chymotrypsin, which is small as enzymes go, is shown . It is estimated that the human body contains more than 2000 enzymes, each with its own unique structure, each catalyzing only a single reaction or closely related set of reactions. In this experiment, our focus will be on the kinetics of enzyme catalysis.