How do enzymes speed up rates of reaction?

1 Answer
Nov 29, 2014

enzymes are catalysts.

enzymes are biomolecules essentially proteins. These proteins take up a number of conformations and in a very specific conformation they exhibit catalytic activity.since these proteins consist of a lot of atoms one can define more than 2 planes(we need 3 atoms to define an angle and 4 to define a plane).Two planes give rise to a dihedral angle between them.And various values of angle and dihedral angle is what defines a conformer.Like all catalysts, enzymes increase the rate of a reaction by lowering its activation energy.These have a lot of advantages over metal catalysts such as :
not expensive
non-toxic
they help in performing highly selective reactions..