Enzyme Activity: Allosteric Regulation

Abstract Cells can respond to changes in their environment by altering the flow through particular metabolic pathways. Such a change in any metabolic step is due to certain key enzymes that have the ability to alter their rate of activity. Such enzymes are defined as allosteric. The extent to which these enzymes adopt either the active conformation or the inactive conformation depends on their response to appropriate positive or negative signals. An easily measured feature of allosteric enzymes is the cooperativity that they show in a kinetic experiment.