Enzyme kinetics is the study of the rates of chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes. The study of enzyme kinetics provides information on how enzymes work, how their activity is controlled in the body and how drugs and poisons inhibit their reactions.

Enzymes are molecular machines that manipulate other molecules. The information provided by an enzyme's structure is akin to a complete blueprint of a machine. However, the information provided by kinetic studies is similar to a movie of this machine in action. In order to completely understand how enzymes work, we need to know both their structures and their mechanisms.

Kinetic studies on enzymes that only bind one substrate, such as catalase, aim to measure the affinity with which the enzyme binds this substrate and how fast it can turn it into a product. When enzymes bind multiple substrates, enzyme kinetics can also show the order in which these substrates bind and the order in which products are released.

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(University of California - Santa Barbara) The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara helped to win the new University of California Center for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology, a five-year, $24 million center co-funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Environmental Protection Agency to study the environmental impacts of nanotechnology.
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(Cell Press) Researchers have identified stem cells with the capacity to build fat. Although they have yet to show that the cells can renew themselves, transplants of the progenitor cells isolated from the fat tissue of normal mice can restore normal fat tissue in animals that are otherwise lacking it.The findings may yield insight into the causes of obesity, a condition characterized by an increase in both the size and number of fat cells.
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(Florida State University) In a groundbreaking study led by an eminent molecular biologist at Florida State University, researchers have discovered that as embryonic stem cells turn into different cell types, there are dramatic corresponding changes to the order in which DNA is replicated and reorganized.

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