BIOL398-01/S11:Class Journal Week 4

Instructions

Formatting

• Link to your journal entry from your user page.
• Link back from the journal entry to your user page.
• Sign your portion of the journal with the standard wiki signature shortcut (~~~~).
• Add the "BIOL398-01/S11" category to the end of the wiki page (if someone has not already done so).

Reflection

1. What was the purpose of this assignment?
2. What aspect of this assignment came most easily to you?
3. What aspect of this assignment was the most challenging for you?
4. What (yet) do you not understand?

Class Responses

James C. Clements' Journal Entry

1. The purpose of this assignment was to learn more about the effect of reaction rates on enzyme kinetics using the Michaelis Menten model. The value for the reaction from the enzyme-substrate complex going back into enzyme and substrate was adjusted, as was the constant for the reaction going from enzyme-substrate complex into product.
2. The Matlab programming came most easily to me.
3. The terminology section was the most difficult for me to understand. I got a little hung up on how to define a chemostat reactor and how to define the Lineweaver-Burk experiment.
4. I don't understand why we're using the Lineweaver-Burk plotting method for measuring enzyme kinetics. The Hanes-Woolf plot seems to be regarded as a superior method. Furthermore, the use of such plots has been made obsolete by nonlinear regression techniques; I'm sure that MatLab is capable of doing a nonlinear regression and giving us the parameters that we're looking for.

James C. Clements 16:56, 6 February 2011 (EST)