2.4.6 Enzyme Activity: Substrate Concentration

Question 1

Enzyme Activity with Substrate Concentration

Answer 1

The greater the substrate concentration, the higher the rate of reaction:
- as the number of substrate molecules increases, the likelihood of enzyme-substrate complex formation increases
- if the enzyme concentration remains fixed but the amount of substrate is increased past a certain point, all available active sites eventually become saturated and any further increase in substrate concentration will not increase the reaction rate
- when the active site of the enzymes are all full, any substrate molecules that are added have nowhere to bind in order to from an enzyme-substrate complex
For this reason, in the graph there is a linear increase in the rate of reaction as substrate is added, which plateaus when all the active site become occupied