What is a dehydrogenase enzyme and what does it do?
1 Answer
It's worth keeping in mind that all the enzymes that we see in real life are named by human beings. As such, they have names that tend to (but don't always) describe what they do. In this case, it ironically is named for the reverse reaction. Let's see what that means...
A dehydrogenase is an enzyme that takes a hydrogen off of something and puts it onto something else.
Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) is actually going to de-hydrogenate (transfer a hydride,
Lactate is thus the reduced (hydrogenated) form of pyruvate.
You typically don't have to know the structures of NADH and NAD+, but they look like this:
(where Ribo is cyclic ribose, and ADP is adenosine diphosphate, a molecule consisting of adenine, a cyclic ribose, and two phosphate groups)
