Enzyme validation

These definitions are valid only when the concentration of the enzyme is very small compared with that of the substrate. Moreover, they apply only to the initial rate of formation of products in other words, the rate of formation of the first few percent of the product, before the substrate has been depleted and products that can interfere with the catalytic reaction have accumulated. 

Equation 11-15 is known as the Michaelis-Menten equation. It represents the kinetics of many simple enzyme-catalyzed reactions, which involve a single substrate. The interpretation of as an equilibrium constant is not universally valid, since the assumption that the reversible reaction as a fast equilibrium process often does not apply. 

According to this expression, a plot of 1/v, versus l/[SJo will yield a straight line if the data follow the Michaelis-Menten mechanism. This line has a slope given by Km/Vmax, a y intercept of 1/Vmax, and an x intercept of -1 fKm. This is also illustrated in Fig. 4-7. Again, this treatment is valid when Eq. (4-107) applies whether or not the catalyst is an enzyme. The Lineweaver-Burk plot, Fig. 4-lb, is convenient for visualization but statistically unreliable for data fitting the form in Eq. (4-107) should be used for numerical analysis. 

Hen egg-white lysozyme catalyzes the hydrolysis of various oligosaccharides, especially those of bacterial cell walls. The elucidation of the X-ray structure of this enzyme by David Phillips and co-workers (Ref. 1) provided the first glimpse of the structure of an enzyme-active site. The determination of the structure of this enzyme with trisaccharide competitive inhibitors and biochemical studies led to a detailed model for lysozyme and its hexa N-acetyl glucoseamine (hexa-NAG) substrate (Fig. 6.1). These studies identified the C-O bond between the D and E residues of the substrate as the bond which is being specifically cleaved by the enzyme and located the residues Glu 37 and Asp 52 as the major catalytic residues. The initial structural studies led to various proposals of how catalysis might take place. Here we consider these proposals and show how to examine their validity by computer modeling approaches. 

The approach taken above estimates the effect of the metal by simply considering its electrostatic effect (subjected, of course, to the correct steric constraint as dictated by the metal van der Waals parameters). To examine the validity of this approach for other systems let s consider the reaction of the enzyme carbonic anhydrase, whose active site is shown in Fig. 8.6. The reaction of this enzyme involves the hydration of C02, which can be described as (Ref. 5)... 

It has been demonstrated that such controls are not valid and that there may be significant differences in enzyme concentrations between two cell types (56). For this reason, normal amniotic fluid cells themselves must be used as controls for amniotic fluid cell cultures being subjected to enzymologic inves t igat ion. 

End-point methods are often not based on kinetic-ally optimum conditions. However, an end-point method is often the only convenient one available. In this case, the method should have been validated by showing that the catalysis of the substrate follows well defined kinetics, rate of reaction is proportional to enzyme concentration, blanks and interfering substances are corrected for, and that appropriate standards are available. 

There are also RMs which are prepared for a specific application and are used for validation of relevant methods. Cobbaert et al. (1999) made use of Ion Selective Electrode (ISE)-protein-based materials when evaluating a procedure which used an electrode with an enzyme-linked biosensor to determine glucose and lactate in blood. Chance et al. (1999) are involved with the diagnosis of inherited disorders in newborn children and they prepared a series of reference materials consisting of blood spotted onto filter paper and dried, from which amino-acids can be eluted and... 

Deformylation of nascent polypeptides has been shown to be a function essential for growth in E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae [15-18]. Moreover, antibacterial mode of action studies, using S. pneumoniae or S. aureus strains in which the expression of PDF is controlled by regulatable promoters, have shown that the antibacterial activity of PDF inhibitors is due to their inhibition of the PDF enzyme, as the susceptibility of the strains to these compounds is dependent on the amount of protein present in the cell [19-21]. These results further validate PDF as a target for novel antibiotics. 

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