| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
Hydrogen peroxide is formed as a waste product of metabolism in many living organisms. It is toxic and must be quickly converted into other, less dangerous, chemicals. To manage this problem, the enzyme catalase is frequently used to rapidly catalyse the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide into harmless oxygen and water. Catalase is also used in the textile industry, removing hydrogen peroxide from fabrics to make sure the material is peroxide free. A minor use is in contact lens hygiene - some lens cleaning systems sterilise the lenses by soaking them in a hydrogen peroxide solution, and catalase is used to decompose the peroxide before reinserting the lenses in the eye.
The complete mechanism of catalase is not yet known; however, the reaction occurs in two stages:
(Where Fe-E represents the iron centre of the heme group attached to the enzyme.)
As hydrogen peroxide enters the active site it is forced to interact with the amino acidIn chemistry, an amino acid is any molecule that contains both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. In biochemistry, this shorter and more general term is frequently used to refer to alpha amino acids: those amino acids in which the amino and carbs His74 and Asn174. This causes a protonFor alternative meanings see proton (disambiguation). Proton Classification Subatomic particle Fermion Hadron Baryon Nucleon Proton Properties Mass: 938 MeV/ c2 Electric Charge: 1. 6 × 10−19 C Spin: 1/2 In physics, the proton is a subatomic particle (hydrogen ion) to transfer from the first oxygen to the second, polarizing and stretching the O-O bond, which breaks heterolytically. The free oxygen atom coordinates with the iron centre of the active site, displacing the newly formed water molecule and forming Fe(IV)=O. In the second stage, the Fe(IV)=O reacts with another hydrogen peroxide to reform Fe(III)-E plus water and oxygen molecules.
3D protein structureProteins are amino acid chains, made up from 20 different L-α-amino acids, also referred to as residues, that fold into unique 3-dimensional protein structures . The shape into a which a protein naturally folds is known as its native state, which iss of the peroxidated catalase intermediates are available at the Protein Data BankThe Protein Data Bank PDB is a repository for 3-D structural data of proteins and nucleic acids. This data, typically obtained by X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy, is submitted by biologists and biochemists from around the world, is released into.