The assessment of genome function requires a mapping between genome-derived entities and biochemical reactions, and the biomedical literature represents a rich source of information about reactions between biological components. However, the increasingly rapid growth in the volume of literature provides both a challenge and an opportunity for researchers to isolate information about reactions o...

This chapter discusses progress over the past 15 years in understanding the role of protein dynamics in enzymatically catalyzed chemical reactions. Research has shown that protein motion on all timescales from femtoseconds to milliseconds can contribute to function, and in particular in some enzymes there are sub-picosecond motions, on the same timescale as barrier passage, the couple directly ...

Product releasing is an essential step of an enzymatic reaction, and a mechanistic understanding primarily depends on the active-site conformational changes and molecular interactions that are involved in this step of the enzymatic reaction. Here we report our work on the enzymatic product releasing dynamics and mechanism of an enzyme, horseradish peroxidase (HRP), using combined single-molecul...

Spatial heterogeneity in cells can be modelled using distinct compartments connected by molecular movement between them. In addition to movement, changes in the amount of molecules are due to biochemical reactions within compartments, often such that some molecular types fluctuate on a slower timescale than others. It is natural to ask the following questions: how sensitive is the dynamics of m...

The R/B and Minitek systems for the identification of Enterobacteriaceae were evaluated, and the results were compared with those obtained by conventional methods. Both systems were rapid and allowed correct identification of about 85% of the 294 isolates (23 species) examined. The individual biochemical reactions showed an overall agreement of 92.6% and 93.1% for the R/B and Minitek systems, r...

In this work, a novel algorithmic approach to detect multiplicity of steady states in enzymatic reaction networks is presented. The method exploits the structural properties of networks derived from the Chemical Reaction Network Theory. In first instance, the space of parameters is divided in different regions according to the qualitative behavior induced by the parameters in the long term dyna...

In the stochastic description of biochemical reaction systems, the time evolution of statistical moments for species population counts is described by a linear dynamical system. However, except for some ideal cases (such as zero- and first-order reaction kinetics), the moment dynamics is underdetermined as lower-order moments depend upon higher-order moments. Here, we propose a novel method to ...

Isotopic composition of reactants affects the rates of chemical and biochemical reactions. As a rule, enrichment of heavy stable isotopes leads to progressively slower reactions. But the recent isotopic resonance hypothesis suggests that the dependence of the reaction rate upon the enrichment degree is not monotonous. Instead, at some "resonance" isotopic compositions, the kinetics increases, w...

It has recently been shown that structural conditions on the reaction network, rather than a 'fine-tuning' of system parameters, often suffice to impart 'absolute concentration robustness' (ACR) on a wide class of biologically relevant, deterministically modelled mass-action systems. We show here that fundamentally different conclusions about the long-term behaviour of such systems are reached ...

Unlike reactions performed in the laboratory—which use homogeneous solutions having spatially uniform concentration profiles of each reactant—reactions that occur in biological systems often involve reactants that are present in concentration gradients and can display unexpected kinetic properties. Such biological reactions can generate spatiotemporal structures that derive from the inclusion o...