Enzymatic Reaction Lab Report

Effects of Temperature and Cofactors on Enzymatic Reactions

“I pledge that no unauthorized assistance has been given or received in the completion of this work. Experiments described were performed by me and/or my lab group and this write-up is entirely my own creative work.”

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Introduction
Enzymes are protein molecules that speed up the rate of reactions by reducing the activation energy of a reaction. They act as catalysts in reactions, increasing the rate at which a normally spontaneous reaction occurs without being changed themselves. Without enzymes, life would not exist because they are vital to the normal function of cellular processes. In an enzymatic reaction, there are two
Three test tubes were used: the first one containing water and catechol only, the second one containing water and enzyme only, and the third one containing water and both catechol and enzyme. The results showed that the first tube containing only catechol had a low change in absorbance, the second tube containing only the enzyme also had a low change absorbance but higher than the first one, and the third tube containing both catechol and enzyme had a high change in absorbance. The higher the change in absorbance means the faster the rate of reaction and more benzoquinone being produced. This means that the test tube containing both catechol and enzyme has the highest color change and a fastest rate of reaction. This leads to the conclusion that the catecholase is clearly seen as the catalyst and needed for the reaction to undergo at a faster rate, but it was also seen that reaction occurred in the tube with only the enzyme solution because there were small amounts of catechol already present. This means that we needed two sets of test tubes for each variable and we also needed to subtract the tube with the enzyme solution from the tube testing the variable in order to get accurate
A chilled potato was peeled by the instructor. The potato was chilled to prevent the catechol and catecholase reaction from occurring when it was peeled and also to prevent denaturing of the enzyme. Since the reaction of catechol turns brown, it is necessary for the brown skin to be removed to prevent the addition of color from the peel to the solution. If the skin was not peeled then the spectrophotometer would not have been able to differentiate between the reaction and the brown skin. The peeled potato was then chopped and placed into a chilled blender. The potato was cut and chopped into pieces to make the blending process easier and cut down on heat production from the blender. Then, 500 milliliters of chilled, distilled water was added to the blender. Distilled water was used because we wanted just the enzyme and did not need the cells to interact. The water cut the cells. All the materials were chilled so that the enzyme did not denature and prevented the reaction from occurring. The components were blended in three, ten-second bursts that released the enzyme from the starch matrix of the potato. It was blended in periodical bursts in order to cut down on heat and prevent denaturing of the enzyme and to prevent the reaction from occurring prematurely. After the blending was finished, the enzyme was strained through a cheesecloth and a funnel to get rid of the excess