A enzyme will denature if the pH level is too low or too high – the bonds in the enzyme break and the enzyme loses its shape and it can no longer do its task – enzymes have specific shapes to alow specific substrates in and if it loses its shape it can no longer accept a subtrate and produce products. Enzymes are moswt often proteins and proteins are held together by hydrogen bonds and desulfide bridges and they are bonds that can be easy to break. Does that help? If you have any more questions then ask away!

an enzyme will also become denatured in temperatures that are above or below optimum, that is why in some cases high fevers are a concern if held for several days, denatured enzymes do have the ability to repair themselves once optimum conditions are met again.

You must mean pH levels – When pH levels get too low or too high an enzyme can become denatured.

i don’t think ‘Edher’ meant pH levels. As an enzyme can also become denatured if the TEMPERATURE is too high. I know this as I am studying denaturing in a peice of coursework for my GCSE work in Biology at school! 🙂

If you ever do a PCR you will learn a good amount on denaturing enzymes. pH and high temperature are the easiest ways to denature. Certain enzymes have certain limits to when they denature.

but are their any treatments that are designed to demonstrate how easily enzymes are denatured?
im curious….

What I know is that too acidic environment means that there’s too much hydrogen ion surrounds the enzyme. We know that mostly enzymes portions are proteins, which is composed of amino acids. When we see the enzyme’s 3D structure, we know that this structure is built by non-covalent bonds which one of them is dipole interaction. So, if there’s too much H+, it would interupt this interaction by binding to a negatively or slightly negative charged amino acid sidechain, eg. histidine, aspartate, glutamate. In other word, I think I’ll consider it as fully protonated.
DIsruption in 3D structure of enzyme would denature it, because the conformation state to be a functional enzyme has gone 🙂

For a PCR you cannot usa mammal enzymes because they denaturate at these temperatures. Youu hav to use special bacteria enzymes, for exampe from Thermus aquaticus(Taq) who live in hot springs.

I have a question relating to this. In my Biology 100 course we had a lab experiment we’re writing a paper on. We had to test the effect of adding pH2, 4, 6, 8, and 12 to liver enzymes and dH2O and then add H2O2 to the solutions and measured the foam produced. What confused most of our class is the more basic pH’s resulted in more catalase activity which wasn’t what we expected. We thought the more acidic pH’s would result in less activity (less foam) which it did, and the neutral pH’s would result in the most activity. But the more basic pH’s had the most foam. Does anyone know if that’s what was supposed to happen, or did something go wrong? Even our teacher can’t explain why this happened.

Thank you
–Dorian

sorry i cant answer that but i also have a question about the enzme catalase, in our experiment with hydrogen peroxide the rate kept increasing up til 50 C when we stopped cos it was too fast to measure, but i thought catalase would denature at about 37 C as its found in mammals after searching for its optimum temp i got things as low as 20 C up to 70 C does anyone know what its optimum temp is?

you should do a control to see whether it decomposes faster IN GENERAL if the temperature is higher….and of course how much faster. Secondly, the enzyme has some resilience in temperature tolerance, it won’t denature as soon as you go above 37.

Sorry don’t have aresponse, but I was wondering what is teh optimum temperature and optimum pH value for the rate of reaction of an enzyme?

depends on the enzyme. Optimum temperature for Taq polymerase is 72 centigrade if I remember correctly…