In this video, we're going to talk about the third class of enzymes, and that is hydrolases. Now, in these types of enzymes, we catalyze hydrolysis reactions. Basically, it breaks bonds by adding water. With this type of class of enzymes, we have subclasses. One important thing to take away from this is that although these are hydrolases, none of them have "hydro" within their name. Okay, so that makes it a little bit more tricky in terms of remembering. But all of them will utilize water to break bonds.
For the first one, we have lipases; we're going to say they hydrolyze ester bonds in lipids. Next, we have proteases; they hydrolyze proteins into peptides and amino acids. So they're breaking down proteins into their less complex structures. Next, we have nucleases; they hydrolyze DNA and RNA into nucleic acids. And then finally, we have phosphatases; they hydrolyze phosphate ester bonds.
So here, if we take a look, we have this polypeptide, and we're going to utilize this protease. Remember, that helps to hydrolyze proteins into peptides and amino acids. It's going to break this polypeptide into smaller chunks. And we're going to be using the enzyme to help us cut or cleave this bond here. If we come over here, what has occurred? Well, we can see that we have severed this bond here and this carbon here is from the previous bond, and it's gained an O-. And then this nitrogen here is the same nitrogen here; it has gained two hydrogens. So what have we gained? We've gained two hydrogens plus one oxygen. So, we've added water to our polypeptide. Okay, so we use water to cut the bond and split it into two pieces. Right? So here, this is a great example of one of our subclasses of hydrolases. Remember, there's a lot of subclasses within this class of enzymes, but none of them have "hydro" within their name.