Chemical structure for thiamine pyrophosphate and protein structure of transketolase. Thiamine pyrophosphate cofactor in yellow and xylulose 5-phosphate substrate in black. Credit: Thomas ...

Enzymes help with specific functions that are vital to the operation and overall health of the human body. They help speed up chemical reactions and are essential for respiration, digestion, muscle ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Scientists have sequenced the genomes of nearly 6,900 organisms, but they know the functions of only about half of the protein-coding genes thus far discovered. Now a ...

Life has evolved over billions of years, adapting to the changing environment. Similarly, enzymes—proteins that speed up biochemical reactions (catalysis) in cells—have adapted to the habitats of ...

Enzymes originally evolved in high-temperature environments and later adapted to lower temperatures as Earth cooled. Scientists discovered that a key shift in enzyme function occurred over ...

Annotations of enzyme function provide critical starting points for generating and testing biological hypotheses, but the quality of functional annotations is hindered by uncertain assignments for ...

Just because an enzyme has an active site doesn’t mean the rest of the enzyme should be disregarded, as though it were so much dead weight. It influences enzyme function, if only by keeping the enzyme ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new artificial intelligence tool can predict the functions of enzymes based on their amino acid sequences, even when the enzymes are unstudied or poorly understood. The researchers ...