Science is a Process, not an Object.

Advanced Honors Biology

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Transport Proteins

The short intro I did in class is found here.
One of the main things a membrane has to be able to do is control what flows through it. Sometime, that's just opening a channel and letting the dissolved thing flow "down gradient." But, sometime the cell has to do active work to pump ions to one side or the other of a membrane.
Once that gradient is established, it can be used to do work…and in fact used in myriad ways you can hardly imagine. Since it is so important, we will spend some time on it.
By the way, the figure is a cartoon of a protein called "aquaporin." Guess what it transports. It's a fascinating protein. Think about how you can make a protein that allows water…and only water…to pass through.
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Intro to Enzyme Kinetics

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Enzymes really are at the heart of how our bodies work. The brief definition is a "bio-catalyst." These are almost always proteins. They lower activation energy of a particular reaction and as such speed it up, both in the forward and backward direction. Almost all enzymes will be able to work either "backwards" or "forwards." Some are effectively one-directional because of large negative delta G0, for example involving ATP hydrolysis. But, even most of these can be reversed.
Enzyme function requires particular structures. Structures of proteins can be altered by the binding of other proteins or other smaller molecules, or the addition of a phosphate to the enzyme at a specific point, or the local pH or charge distribution…so, every step of enzyme function can be regulated.
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Enzyme Cofactors

Many enzymes use "cofactors" to help carry out their function. The one above is a "Heme." We will see a lot of these and similar structures. The ring is called a porphyrin ring. A heme is a porphyrin ring with an iron in it. The iron can carry oxygen molecules. We discussed hemoglobin earlier. That protein carries oxygen in your blood. Or, to be more correct, that protein carries a 4 heme groups, each of which carries an iron, each of which carries oxygen.
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Enolase detail

I thought getting into the mechanism…even just the idea of a mechanism…would be useful. This is a bit of a deep dive into the mechanism of enolase in glycolysis. This enzyme catalyzes the step right before pyruvate kinase, the second "pay-off" or substrate-level phosphorylation step.
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