THE SEED-GERMINATION MODEL OF ENZYME CATALYSIS

The activity of enzymes and other biological macromolecules is often sensitively dependent on physiochemical context. Seed germination provides an analogy that helps to elicit the control and information processing capabilities of enzymatic networks. Like a seed, the enzyme takes a particular action (complexes with a specific substrate and catalyzes a specific reaction) when a specific set of milieu influences is satisfied. The context sensitivity, specificity and speed are enormously enhanced by the parallelism inherent in the electronic wave function (i.e. by the superposition of electronic states). This parallelism is converted to speedup through electronic-conformational interactions. The quantum speedup effect allows biological 'switches' to have qualitatively greater pattern recognition capabilities than electronic switches. Consequently the information processing and control capabilities of biomolecular systems exceed the capabilities obtainable from classical models and exceed the intuitive expectations that have developed through the study of such models.