Enzymes are specialized proteins that act as . Their primary role is to accelerate the rate of a chemical reaction by significantly lowering the activation energy required for that reaction to proceed. Crucially, enzymes are not consumed or permanently altered by the reactions they facilitate; they emerge from the process unchanged and ready to catalyze the next substrate molecule.
Keywords used: fundamentals of enzymology the cell and molecular biology of catalytic proteins pdf, enzyme kinetics, catalytic mechanisms, protein purification, allosteric regulation, enzyme evolution.