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How enzyme moves?


fredreload

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So I am curious as to know how the enzyme "gets" to the right place for a reaction. To begin with, enzymes are free floating in a cell. Do they attract to the substract like a magnet and home in on them or how exactly do they move? I know I can't really picture this in a molecular scale, but how enzymes move has a lot to do with how a nanomachine could be designed.

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No they basically need to bump into each other for something to happen. It is generally assumed that in small bacterial cells the volume is sufficiently small for it to happen by chance (though there may be some mechanisms that allow crowding). In larger cells many reactions are confined within certain organelles for this reason. Actual enzyme movement is based on conformational changes but they do not hunt down their substrates actively, if that is what you mean.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Enzymes are proteins which have a tertiary (i think?) structure and this means that they have a complex shape, enabling substrates to be very specific to the enzyme (they have to have the shape which fits in)

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