Video Transcript
Fill in the blank. The reactant that an enzyme will
bind to, due to its complementary shape, is a blank.
This question asks us to recall
some terms relating to enzymes. So let’s review these briefly.
You might remember that an enzyme
is a biological catalyst. This is because enzymes accelerate
chemical reactions. A chemical reaction is the process
in which a substance or multiple substances are changed into a new substance or new
substances. The initial substance is called a
reactant, and the final substance of the reaction is called a product. The enzyme can only help to speed
up a chemical reaction if the reactant binds at a specific place on the enzyme
called the active site.
When an enzyme is involved in the
reaction, the reactant is called a substrate. The binding of enzyme and substrate
occurs through complementary shapes between the enzyme and the substrate. You can see this complementarity in
this diagram. More specifically, we can say that
the enzyme’s active site is complementary to its specific substrate. Each enzyme has a specific
substrate that it binds to.
Enzymes are very important to
catalyze various chemical reactions in our bodies. This is the reason they are quite
abundant in the body. Actually, scientists believe that
there are more than 1000 different enzymes in human body cells.
Now that we have discussed some
basic terminology relating to enzymes and their substrates, let’s take another look
at our question. We were asked to fill in the
blank. The reactant that an enzyme will
bind to, due to its complementary shape, is a blank. We know that enzymes bind to
specific substrates via their complementary active site. So the correct answer here is
substrate. Our full answer should therefore
read, “The reactant that an enzyme will bind to, due to its complementary shape, is
a substrate.”
