Monday, January 17, 2011

The Discovery of Enzyme

The most varied and most highly specialized proteins are those with catalytic activity--the enzymes.

The word enzymes comes from the Greek root ‘enzymos’, which means “to cause change.”

Historically, biological catalysis has been used by mankind for thousands of years, ever since fermentation was discovered as a process for brewing and bread making in ancient Egypt.

It was not until the 19th century AD, however, that scientist addressed the question of whether the entity responsible for processes such as fermentation was a living species or a chemical substance.

The first isolation of an enzyme by Payen and Persoz in 1833. They added ethanol to an aqueous extract of malt and obtained a heat labile precipitate that was utilized to hydrolyze starch to soluble sugar.

The substance in this precipitate, which they called ‘diastase’, is now known as amylase.

In 1857, Louis Pasteur established that the process of fermentation was closely associated with the growth and life of yeast.

Eduard Buchner coined the term called ‘zymase’ which found in yeast cells was responsible for fermentation.

What is enzyme? Enzyme is a protein that speeds up or catalyzes a chemical reaction. It is a protein catalyst employed by a cell to speed up metabolic reactions.

It was Duclaux who proposed in 1898 that all enzymes should have the suffix “ase” so that a substance would be recognized as an enzyme from the name.
The Discovery of Enzyme

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