Enzyme Catalysis

Biologically important reactions are catalyzed by enzymes, which are composed of proteins or RNA. Enzyme-catalyzed reactions in cells are critical for accelerating slow reactions sufficiently to meet the needs of the cells for specific compounds. The regulation of enzyme activity enables the rates of production of many metabolites to be controlled in response to the requirements of the cell. The enzyme can not only decrease the activation energy for the reaction, but also completely change the mechanism of a reaction, in which case comparing the kinetic parameters is not very meaningful. Applications of efficient methods in investigating the functional behavior of enzymes recognized by substrates throughout catalysis are needed. Prof. Mitrasinovic is interested in understanding how enzymes involved in drug metabolism, intracellular signal transduction pathways, and cell cycle control work at the molecular scale by employing a wide variety of computational methods, being well calibrated with respect to the existing experimental observations and yielding novel thermodynamic and kinetic insights into enzyme activity.