What are two chemical factors and two physicalenvironmental

What are two chemical factors and two physical/environmental factors that can affect enzyme activity? How?

Solution

Enzymes are biocatalysts that bring about a wide variety of biological reactions in any living organism. They accelerate the rate of reaction by lowering the energy of activation.

The activity of an enzyme is altered by several factors. Due to its protein nature enzymes aresusceptible. any c physical or chemical changes.

chemical factors.:

There are several chemical factors that alter the activity of the enzyme.

Substrate concentration: An increase in the concentration of substrate is known to increase the rate of a reaction as more molecules are available for the enzyme to act upon .This change can happen only until all the enzyme molecules are saturated when further increase in the concentration of the substrate has no effect on the activity of the enzyme.

Similarly an increase in the concentration of the enzyme also increases the rate of reaction as more enzyme molecules collide with the substrayte molecules and accelaetrate the reaction. This also is possible only up to certain concentration when further increase in the concentration of the enzyme has no effect on the rate of reaction.

Physical factors:

Temperarture is one of the most important factor that affects the activity of an enzyme. As enzymes are protein by nature at higher temperature they are denatured .An increase in temperature increases the kinetic energy between the molecules and hence increases collision and more product is formed.

pH; pH also has profound effect on the activity of the enzyme. Some enzymes are more active in acidic pH while others may prefer basic pH.some of them may even function at neutral pH also.pH influences the activity by altering the active site of the enzyme thus facilitating the binding of the substrate molecule.