Pharma gyan Pandit

Enzymes

French chemist Anselme Payen was the first to discover an enzyme, diastase, in 1833. A few decades later, when studying the fermentation of sugar to alcohol by yeast, Louis Pasteur concluded that this fermentation was caused by a vital force contained within the yeast cells called "ferments", which were thought to function only within living organisms. He wrote that "alcoholic fermentation is an act correlated with the life and organization of the yeast cells, not with the death or putrefaction of the cells."

In 1877, German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne (1837–1900) first used the term enzyme, which comes from Greek ἔνζυμον, "leavened", to describe this process. The word enzyme was used later to refer to nonliving substances such as pepsin, and the word ferment was used to refer to chemical activity produced by living organisms.

Enzymes are proteins that have catalytic functions indispensable to maintenance and activity of life. All chemical reactions occurring in a living organism are dependent on the catalytic actions of enzymes, and this is why enzymes are called Biotransformation. At present, there are about 4,000 kinds of enzymes whose actions are well known.

Enzymes function in a mild environment similar to the body environment of a living organism, and they support life by synthesizing and degrading materials that constitute the building blocks of the organism and by creating energy. Enzymes function as highly selective catalysis in such a way that they selectivity catalyze specific reactions (reaction specificity) and specific materials (substrate specificity).