Metabolism Questions

1. What is metabolism?

   The sum of all an organism’s chemical reactions.

2. Why do living things seem to break the laws of physics (thermodynamics)?

   Living things seem to break the laws of physics because of the ability to maintain order by keeping a clear distinction between what’s inside a cell and what’s out. We are able to negate the natural desire of the universe towards disorder (entropy) and have order in our cells.

3. What are four things’ organisms use energy for?

   Growth, maintenance, reproduction, and body temperature.

4. What are coupled reactions?

   Chemical reactions that take place one after the other.

5. What is the cell’s main currency in terms of energy? How is it produced?

   Cell’s main currency is ATP and it’s produced through cellular respiration.

6. Describe how enzymes function.

   Enzymes have an active site in which substrates fit into. This allows different shapes of the enzyme and will determine the function.

7. What would occur if living things did not enzymes?

   It would take a lot more activation energy to have chemical reactions.

8. What is the relationship between metabolism and body size?

   Generally, the bigger the body size, the slower the metabolism.

9. How are noncompetitive inhibitors different from competitive inhibitors?

   Noncompetitive inhibitors will simply change the shape of the enzyme so that the substrate can no longer bond at the enzyme’s active site. Competitive inhibitors will not change the shape of the enzyme but bond to the active site before the substrate.

10. What four factors affect how well enzymes functions?

    temperature, pH, inhibitors, and concentration of enzyme present

11. Describe how an increase or decrease in the factors above would affect a chemical reaction.

    • An increase in the temperature would make chemical reactions go faster because molecules more erratically with more heat, causing more collisions so the substate and enzyme are more likely to collide. Too much heat would cause the enzyme to denature since it is a protein, which’ll slow down the reaction and then cease.

    • An increase or decrease in pH would cause fewer chemical reactions because enzymes generally like a pH of around 7.

    • An increase of inhibitors would mean it’s less likely a substrate will be able to bind to an enzyme because the inhibitors would get there before the substrates due to being outnumbered.

    • An increase or decrease in the concentration of enzymes present would make chemical reactions faster or slower because there are more or less active sites for the substrates (or inhibitors) to bind to.

12. What is pH and how do we measure it?

    pH is power of hydrogen, and it measures the concentration of H+ ions or OH- ions

Extra PowerPoint Notes

• Reactions happen in a sequential order with the products of one reaction being the reactants of the next reaction.