ABSTRACT
There are many excellent books on enzymes, some of which are listed at the end of this chapter. Many of these deal either with kinetics or with mechanisms, or with both. However, my concern in this chapter is to emphasize those factors of most relevance to the themes of this book, which are mainly about binding and evolution rather than catalytic mechanism. We shall see that a good proportion of the catalytic power demonstrated by enzymes arises from their ability to bind substrates and to change in response to substrate binding, topics that are fundamental to the function of all proteins, not merely enzymes. Therefore, I hope to demonstrate that enzymes are not “special” in that sense. The material in this chapter will prove challenging for some readers, because this chapter is more chemical than any of the others and so the chemistry is explained in particular detail.
