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Enzyme kinetics; Monte Carlo; percolation; random walk; obstacle.

The cytoplasm of a living cell is crowded with several macromolecules of different shapes and sizes. Molecular diffusion in such a medium becomes anomalous due to the presence of macromolecules and diffusivity is expected to decrease with increase in macromolecular crowding. Moreover, many cellular processes are dependent on molecular diffusion in the cell cytosol. The enzymatic reaction rate has been shown to be affected by the presence of such macromolecules. A simple numerical model is proposed here based on percolation and diffusion in disordered systems to study the effect of macromolecular crowding on the enzymatic reaction rates. The model qualitatively explains some of the experimental observations.

Manish Agrawal¹ S B Santra² Rajat Anand¹ Rajaram Swaminathan¹

1. Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781 039, India
2. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781 039, India

Published

August 2008