Assignment task:
List five facts from the text below: Enzymes remember are chemicals that aren't consumed in a reaction but can speed up a reaction. One of the major ones we'll talk about this year in AP Bio is called catalase. Catalase is an enzyme that's found in almost all living cells, especially eukaryotic cells. But what it does is it breaks down hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen Peroxide you probably knew growing up, you put it on a cut maybe and it would bubble or you can use it to bleach your hair. That's pretty dilute hydrogen peroxide actually concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is somebody who's touched 30% Hydrogen Peroxide. It damages and kills cells. And so Hydrogen peroxide is just produced naturally and chemical reactions but your cell has to get rid of it before it builds up. And appreciable amount. And it uses catalase to do that. And so if we were to look at the equation, so we've got hydrogen peroxide or h2o Two, this is going to break down into two things. One is water and the other one is to oxygen. So this is not a balanced reaction. So if I put a two there, and I put it to here, so hydrogens, I got four four. Oxygens I got so perfect. So this is a balanced equation. So you've got two hydrogen peroxide breaking down into two water molecules and one oxygen molecule. But it does that using an enzyme and so in other words, hydrogen peroxide, let me get my air to fit in here is going to feed into catalase and it's going to break that down into these two products, water and oxygen. And it does that at an incredible rate. I was reading that 40 million hydrogen peroxide will go into a catalase and be broken down into water and oxygen 40 million every second. And so it's incredibly fast at breaking down that hydrogen peroxide into something that can that it can use. And so how does it do that? Well, that's what I'm going to talk about. And so basically an enzyme and let me try and draw an enzyme. So if an enzyme looks like this, it's a giant protein. So if we say it looks like that, it's going to have an area inside it called the active site. And so the active site could do this. Good. So the active site is basically going to be a part of the enzyme where there's a hole in it. So this is this giant protein. It's got an active site, and the substrate is going to fit into it. And so going back to how to enzymes work, well the active site is going to be an area within the enzyme. So this would be the enzyme here. And basically the substrate fits into it. And so what was the example we were just talking about? The enzyme was catalase. What was the substrate? substrate is h2o to or hydrogen peroxide. So that's how enzymes work. It basically tugs on the substrate and breaks it down. It's very important in chemical reactions, and sometimes we want to turn on enzymes and sometimes we want to turn off enzymes. And so in every step of photosynthesis, and every step of the cellular respiration and glycolysis, citric acid cycle, all of those chemical reactions, remember, have to have an enzyme that's associated with them. That can speed up that reactions. And so it's really important that we sometimes activate or turn on those enzymes. It's also just as important that sometimes we turn them off, turn them off. And so there are two types of inhibition. Inhibition can either be competitive that's where a chemical is blocking the active site or Allosteric, when we're actually changing the shape, or given another shape, chemical reactions. Another important thing that we want to measure with them is the rate of a chemical reaction. And we can do that by either measuring the reactants or the products. So let me start talking about what I'm going to talk about and actually talk about it. And so here is our enzyme. So our enzyme that we talked about was called catalase. So catalase is going to be a protein. It has a specific shape. And so if we go down here to the enzyme, this would be the enzyme right here. It's going to have an active site and active