It is widely assumed that the control coefficient of an enzyme on pathway flux decreases as the concentration of enzyme increases. However, it has been shown [Kholodenko and Brown (1996) Biochem. J. 314, 753-760] that enzymes with sigmoidal kinetics can maintain or even gain control with an increase in enzyme activity or concentration. This has been described as 'paradoxical control'. Here we f...

Reliability of kinetic parameters are crucial in understanding enzyme kinetics within cellular system. The present study suggests a few cautions that need introspection for estimation of parameters like M K , Max V and I K using Lineweaver-Burk plots. The quality of 50 IC too needs a thorough reinvestigation because of its direct link with I K and M K values. Inhibition kinetics under both stea...

A high-resolution carboxypeptidase-Zn(2+)-citrate complex was studied by X-ray diffraction and enzyme kinetics for the first time. The citrate molecule acts as a competitive inhibitor of this benchmark zinc-dependent peptidase, chelating the catalytic zinc ion in the active site of the enzyme and inducing a conformational change such that carboxypeptidase adopts the conformation expected to occ...

We study the two-dimensional reduction of the Michaelis-Menten reaction of enzyme kinetics. First, we prove the existence and uniqueness of a slow manifold between the horizontal and vertical isoclines. Second, we determine the concavity of all solutions in the first quadrant. Third, we establish the asymptotic behaviour of all solutions near the origin, which generally is not given by a Taylor...

The rectangular hyperbola, y = abx/(1 + bx), is widely used as a fit model in the analysis of data obtained in studies of complexation, sorption, fluorescence quenching, and enzyme kinetics. Frequently, the "independent variable" x is actually a directly measured quantity, and y may be a simply computed function of x, like y = x(0) - x. These circumstances violate one of the fundamental tenets ...

Blood islands are conglomerations of prevascular stem cells that form during vasculogenesis, a function critical to early vascular and hematopoietic development. In this paper, a model of blood island formation is proposed employing the approach of classical enzyme kinetics. Deterministic simulations of the model show the formation of blood island-like structures. These are compared to murine b...

In an attempt to understand whether it should be expected that some genes tend to be used disproportionately often by natural selection, we investigated two related phenomena: the evolution of flux control among enzymes in a metabolic pathway and properties of adaptive substitutions in pathway enzymes. These two phenomena are related by the principle that adaptive substitutions should occur mor...

The present study compares two computer models of the first part of glucose catabolism in different organisms in search of evolutionarily conserved characteristics of the glycolysis cycle and proposes the main parameters that define the stable steady-state or oscillatory behavior of the glycolytic system. It is suggested that in both human pancreatic beta-cells and Saccharomyces cerevisiae ther...

Victor Henri's great contribution to the understanding of enzyme kinetics and mechanism is not always given the credit that it deserves. In addition, his earlier work in experimental psychology is totally unknown to biochemists, and his later work in spectroscopy and photobiology almost equally so. Applying great rigour to his analysis he succeeded in obtaining a model of enzyme action that exp...

Aryl sulfonamides are a widely used drug class for the inhibition of carbonic anhydrases. In the context of our program of photochromic pharmacophores we were interested in the exploration of azobenzene-containing sulfonamides to block the catalytic activity of human carbonic anhydrase II (hCAII). Herein, we report the synthesis and in vitro evaluation of a small library of nine photochromic su...