Adults who are lactose intolerant cannot break down the disaccharide in milk products. To help digest dairy food, a product known as Lactaid can be given prior to consuming dairy products. (16.4, 16.5)
b. What might happen to the enzyme if the Lactaid were stored at 55 °C?

Question

Adults who are lactose intolerant cannot break down the disaccharide in milk products. To help digest dairy food, a product known as Lactaid can be given prior to consuming dairy products. (16.4, 16.5)
b. What might happen to the enzyme if the Lactaid were stored at 55 °C?

b. What might happen to the enzyme if the Lactaid were stored at 55 °C?

Accepted Answer

All right. Hello everyone. So this question says that adults who have, who have difficulty digesting starch often use an enzyme supplement known as amylase to help break down starches in their diet. Suppose a product containing amylase is added to a starch rich food and the mixture is refrigerated for 24 hours. What would happen to the Emily if the product was stored at 75 °C? So first, let's talk about the conditions at which proteins such as enzymes operate right? When it comes to any given enzyme, recall that we talk about a set of optimal conditions that's unique to any given enzyme. And the reason for this is because as mentioned before, the vast majority of enzymes are proteins. And so when it comes to proteins, in particular, the structure of any protein heavily informs its function or at least how well it can perform its function. And so any change in factors such as temperature, ph et cetera can change the structure of the protein and therefore negatively impact its function. So let's talk about optimal temperature with a graph here. So on the x axis, I'm going to have temperature in this case in degrees Celsius and then on the y axis, let's talk about enzyme activity, right? When storing a particular enzyme at a very low temperature, oftentimes that enzyme is going to be essentially inactivated, right. However, as you slowly start to increase the temperature, what you'll notice is that the activity of the enzyme begins to increase. And the reason for this is because as you're increasing the temperature, there are going to be more frequent collisions between the enzyme and the substrate. This means that the reaction in question is going to occur more often. Now, at a certain point, right, the activity of a given enzyme is going to reach a peak at a specific temperature. This is the aforementioned optimal temperature. This is the most ideal set of conditions for that particular enzyme. It's the enzyme's favorite temperature basically. So then what happens at points beyond the optimal temperature? Well, as mentioned before, if the temperature is too different from these optimal conditions, then the structure of the enzyme starts to be affected. And what higher temperatures do is disrupt intermolecular forces between the amino acids holding that protein structure together. And so once the temperature is too high, enzyme activity starts to decrease until you reach the bare minimum or really until you reach a point close to zero enzyme activity. And so the reason why enzyme activity falls to zero as a result of this increased temperature is because by this point, the enzyme has denatured, it's unfolded, right? Its structure is now completely lost, which means that it's no longer able to perform its function. So with that being said, right, for most human enzymes, at the very least, the optimal temperature is somewhere around 37 °C because that's our body temperature. Amylase in particular can function at a slightly higher temperature range, but it's a very narrow range when talking about a temperature as drastically high as 75 °C. By this point, amylase has completely lost its function because of how different and how much higher this temperature is from the optimal conditions that we were just talking about. And so from there, we've arrived at our final answer, which I can reveal now by scrolling down. So basically at a temperature such as 75 °C, that's way higher than the optimal temperature amylase will denature, losing its functional structure and activity. And so with that being said, thank you so very much for watching. And I hope you found this helpful.

Adults who are lactose intolerant cannot break down the disaccharide in milk products. To help digest dairy food, a product known as Lactaid can be given prior to consuming dairy products. (16.4, 16.5)
b. What might happen to the enzyme if the Lactaid were stored at 55 °C?

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Lactase Enzyme Function

Enzyme Stability and Temperature

Impact of Denaturation on Enzyme Activity

Adults who are lactose intolerant cannot break down the disaccharide in milk products. To help digest dairy food, a product known as Lactaid can be given prior to consuming dairy products. (16.4, 16.5)b. What might happen to the enzyme if the Lactaid were stored at 55 °C?

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Lactase Enzyme Function

Enzyme Stability and Temperature

Impact of Denaturation on Enzyme Activity

Adults who are lactose intolerant cannot break down the disaccharide in milk products. To help digest dairy food, a product known as Lactaid can be given prior to consuming dairy products. (16.4, 16.5)
b. What might happen to the enzyme if the Lactaid were stored at 55 °C?