“What factors impact enzyme activity within the digestive system?”
Temperature
pH Levels
Concentration
Enzyme Concentration
Substrate Concentration
Salt Concentration
Raising temperatures usually speeds up the reaction, and lowering temperature slows down the reaction.
Extreme high temperatures can cause an enzyme to lose its shape (denature) and stop working
Temperature tends to impact the enzyme activity within the digestive system as certain types of enzymes thrive better in different types of environments e.g. warmer temperatures (not too extreme temperatures like extremely cold environments & extremely hot environments)
Just like temperature, extreme pH levels can cause an enzyme to denature
Each enzyme has an optimum pH range.
The optimum pH range is the pH value that the specific enzymes work best in
If you were to change the pH level outside of this range, it will slow down enzyme activity
Our digestive system contains many enzymes, within the digestive system, if the pH levels decrease (below the optimal level), so does enzyme activity.
Increasing or decreasing the pH levels outside of the range can cause slower reactions, denaturing, and stop working.
Salts can activate or deactivate the enzyme depending upon its concentration
. If the salt concentration is too high or too low then, It would/can break the interactions in the tertiary structure of the enzymes.
The loss of the tertiary structure will cause the enzymatic activity to be inactive/stop working.
If enzyme concentration increases, enzyme activity will increase.
This increase will smoothen and steady eventually because the number of enzymes equals or exceeds the number of available substrates.
Increasing enzyme concentration will speed up the reaction, as long as there is substrate available to bind to. Once all of the substrate is bound, the reaction will no longer speed up.
an increase in substrate concentration leads to an increase in the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction
Enzymes bind substrates at key locations in their structure called active sites.
the number of enzymes present in an area.
As the enzyme molecules become saturated with substrate, this increase in reaction rate levels off. The rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction increases with an increase in the concentration of an enzyme.
At low concentration of substrate, there is a steep increase in the rate of reaction with increasing substrate concentration.