Question

What environmental factors are most adequate for human enzymes? This includes salt concentration, pH, and heat? What primary source can validate that answer?

Answer 1

Several factors affect the rate at which enzymatic reaction proceeds like TEMPERATURE ,pH , SALT CONCENTRATION, SUBSTRATE CONCENTRATION, ENZYME CONCENTRATION and the presence of any inhibitors and activators.

If salt concentration is close to zero ,the charged amino acid side chains of the enzyme molecule will attract towards each other .The enzyme will denature and form precipitate. On the other hand if the salt concentration is too high , normal interaction of charged groups will be blocked , new interaction will occur and again the enzyme will precipitate . AN INTERMEDIATE SALT CONCENTRATION such as that of human blood (0.9%) or cytoplasm is optimum for many enzymes.

Like most of chemical reaction , the rate of an enzyme catalysed reaction is increased as the temperature is raised. A 10°C rise in temperature will increase the activity of most of the enzyme by 50 to 100% .Variations in the reaction temperature as small as 1 or 2 °C may introduce changes upto 10 to 20% . In the case of enzymatic reaction, this is complicated by the fact that many enzymes are adversely affected by high temperature. The reaction rate increase with temperature to a maximum level , than abruptly declines with further increase in temperature. Because most animal enzyme become denatured at the temperature above 40°C , most enzyme determination are carried out somewhat below that temperature.

In the same way that every enzyme has an optimum temperature , so each enzyme also has an optimum pH at which it works best. For example pepsin and trypsin both are enzymes in the digestive system which break protein chain in the food into peptides and amino acids . Pepsin works in the highly acidic conditions of the stomach It has an optimum pH of about 1.5 On the other hand trypsin works in the small intestine which has a pH of around 7.5

So different enzymes have their different optimum pH on which they work .