What is iso enzymes?
Answers
Enzymes are proteins that make things happen in cells. For example, enzymes produce energy, restore DNA mutations, move things across the plasma membrane and many other things that make life possible for cells. Think of all the things a cell has to do, enzyme regulation becomes complex quick!
However, things get even crazier when you start thinking about enzyme regulation in multicellular organisms. Multicellular organisms have many cells, organs, and different stages of life that require enzymes to function.
With this in mind, you would need a lot of enzymes. How would you resolve the problem of regulating enzymes? Perhaps make multiple enzymes with the same function? This is exactly what happens. In fact, there are two ways that our bodies can make variations of an enzyme.
1. A single gene can make different variations of the enzyme called allozymes.2. Different genes can make different variations of the enzyme called isozymes.
Let's say that an enzyme is needed to make a Twinkie you eat into energy. We'll call it Twinkinase. A single gene could make a variant of Twinkinase, or multiple genes could code for different variants.
Figure 1: Twinkinase comes in multiple forms. Although Gene A produces several allozymes, while the other genes produce isozymes.Regardless of how the variations of enzymes are produced, the result is the same. You end up with multiple forms of an enzyme that have different amino acid sequences and therefore different shapes, sizes, and electrical charges, but the same function.