Peroxidase Lab Report

INTRODUCTION Substances that bind or react to each other use a certain amounts of energy to create a new product in a chemical reaction. Enzymes are proteins used in these reactions to create the same product using less of its supplied energy in that same amount of time. Enzymes are biocatalysts and will bind with the reactive molecules to create substrates forming enzyme-substrate complexes. These complex alter the chemical bonding in the molecules so that they react to each other in the same amount of time using less activation energy.

There are certain factors that alter how effective an enzyme might be in the reaction. Enzymes function better in warmer temperatures, the heat causes the molecules to move faster which increases the likelihood

We use peroxidase as our enzyme in the experiment. Peroxidase is found in plants, such as turnip, and can convert hydrogen peroxide to water and oxygen. We had which were hydrogen peroxide (3%) and hydroxylamine. The hydrogen peroxide competes with the hydroxylamine for the active site molecules from peroxidase. The peroxidase needs the hydrogen peroxide in order to separate it into water and oxygen. If enough of the hydroxylamine is used in the test tube, it will stop the enzyme from binding with the hydrogen peroxide causing competitive

For accurate results on our experiment, we decided to break it up into three sections, testing only three test tubes at a time. We added all of our substances to our first three tubes right before we put them in the spectrophotometer and recorded their absorbency every 30 seconds for 5 minutes for each one. This gives us the most accurate results when testing for enzymes since we are giving each test tube the same amount of time for the chemicals to react to each other. We followed the same process for the two remaining sets of test