Essay About Enzymes

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Recommended: List the importance of enzymes in living organisms

Life Science ORT
Papain Enzyme
Mitchell Fieldgate
Introduction:
Enzymes in general are very interesting to learn from and are fundamental in carrying out processes in various organisms. Enzymes are proteins that control the speed of reactions, they help quicken the rate of the reaction and also help cells to communicate with each other. There are 3 main groups of enzymes, first are the metabolic enzymes that control breathing, thinking, talking, moving, and immunity. Next are the digestive enzymes that digest food and normally end with –ase, there are 22 known digestive enzymes and examples of these are Amylase, Protease, and Lipase. The final group are the Food or plant enzymes which is what my enzyme that I’m studying falls under. Papain gets its name because it comes from papaya fruit, its main purpose is to break down proteins and break peptide bonds however it is not only used in the Papaya fruit and has many external uses. It was also very helpful in the 1950s when scientists were trying to understand enzymes. It also helps us to this day understand Protein structural studies and peptide mapping. Without enzymes, reactions in the body would not happen fast enough and would tarnish our way of life which is why it is vital that we study and learn from them.

Literature Review
Enzymes as mentioned before help speed up reactions, they generally work by bonding to a substrate, this bonding occurs at the active site. This link then forms a different molecule which will benefit its respective process. Every enzyme has its own optimum pH level to work under, if too low the enzyme will be very slow. However if too high the enzyme will then denature and be obsolete. This is why it is important to know the optimum pH level for whatev...

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... still prevalent in enzyme research. The limitations to my research were that I only tested it on one type of protein which was gelatine even though the enzyme is more well known for its involvement in tenderizing meat. Another limitation is that I couldn’t test the strength of each in my experiment and could only check the consistency of each beaker. If I could test the strength of each beaker then my results would have been more conclusive and given me a better idea of how well the papain enzyme broke down the proteins. A recommendation would be that a more thorough experiment should be carried out in order to get a better picture of how well the papain enzyme can break down proteins. However my experiment did give me sufficient results as there was some evidence of the proteins in the gelatine getting broken down and therefore my research question was answered.

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