Now, enzymes. Enzymes represent protein or non-protein molecules, and they act as catalysts by speeding up rates of biochemical reactions. Now we're going to say they do this by lowering the activation energy of a reaction. Remember, activation energy is Ea. Now recall also that the activation energy is the minimum energy required for a reaction to occur. And what's important here is that enzymes themselves are not altered or consumed in the reaction. This means that you're going to start out with enzyme A at the beginning of the reaction, and by the end of the reaction you should still have enzyme A.
Now, besides the enzyme, we have another structure called the substrate. The substrate is just the reactant, which binds with the enzyme. And what's important here is that it's much smaller than the enzyme. By working with the enzyme, the substrate transforms into our products. Now, if we take a look here at this image, we said the substrate is much smaller than the enzyme. So, this large purple structure here is our enzyme. And our smaller thing here is our substrate. So, we have these blue structures, these blue shapes together that are substrates. When they connect together by attaching to this part of the enzyme, we create what's called an enzyme-substrate complex. By them working together, the substrates that are in blue are going to be transformed. At the end of the reaction, the structure lets go of the enzyme. So, we've recreated our enzyme. Remember, the enzyme does not get altered in this process. It started off in this version, and by the end it's back to its original structure. But the substrate gets transformed into our products. We can see that they were blue initially, but through this reaction, they now are two separate things in different colors, representing the creation of something new, our products. Right? So, this is how our substrate and enzymes interact with one another. Enzymes help to speed up the transformation of our substrate into products.
