Principles of Enzymology

Enzymes are macromolecular biological catalysts. Enzymes accelerate or catalyze chemical reactions. The molecules at the beginning of the process are called substrates and the enzyme converts these into different molecules called products. Almost all metabolic processes in the cell need enzymes in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life. The set of enzymes made in a cell determines which metabolic pathways occur in that cell. The study of enzymes is called Enzymology. Enzymes are known to catalyze more than 5000 biochemical reaction types. Most enzymes are proteins although a few are catalytic RNA molecules. Enzymes' specificity comes from their unique three-dimensional structures.