Enzyme Experiment: An Investigation Of The Succinate Dehydrogenase

An investigation of the enzyme succinate dehydrogenase.

Introduction

Enzymes are a catalysts that speed up a chemical reaction inside of a cell without being consumed or changed by the reaction. (Wright, W. 2015) Enzymes catalyse reactions by lowering the activation energy that is required for the reaction to occur. (Nature, 2012) In this experiment we will be using Succinate dehydrogenase which is an enzyme that has been extracted from chicken hearts, succinate dehydrogenase is an enzyme of the TCA cycle (citric acid cycle) and involves the catalyses the oxidation of succinate, this means there is a loss of 2 hydrogen atoms. The aims of this experiment are to use 6-dichlorophenolindophenol (DPIP) as a hydrogen acceptor. When DPIP is blue it is in a oxidised state, but when it accepts 2 hydrogen atoms it will become colourless, the disappearing of colour indicates that a reaction is occurring. After the colour is gone we use the time taken to work out the rate of the reaction. in this experiment we will

lastly we will add 1ml of 0.0003M DPIP, we made sure it was mixed well so the tube contained the same uniform colour, as soon as the DPIP was mixed we timed the time taken for the blue to fade from the tube. The outcome for the time taken for the colour to disappear was 3 minutes and 40 seconds which gave us the baseline for our experiment. The normal range for this experiment is usually between 2 and 7, if the time taken was under 2 minutes we would of needed to reduce the volume of the enzyme added and if the time taken was over 7 minutes we would of needed to increase the volume of the enzyme, and adjusting the buffer to make sure the volume in the tubes are 7mls for each experiment. As no modifications where made we can move on knowing our enzyme is the correct volume to conduct our