Coupling Through Emergent Conservation Laws (Part 5)

joint post with Jonathan Lorand, Blake Pollard, and Maru Sarazola

Coupling is the way biology makes reactions that ‘want’ to happen push forward desirable reactions that don’t want to happen. Coupling is achieved through the action of enzymes—but in a subtle way. An enzyme can increase the rate constant of a reaction. However, it cannot change the ratio of forward to reverse rate constants, since that is fixed by the difference of free energies, as we saw in Part 2:

and the presence of an en...