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1 85578 158 1
Portland Press
£25 (Biochemical Society members, £18.75)
Fundamentals of Enzyme Kinetics
Athel Cornish-Bowden
Enzyme kinetics had its heyday in the middle quarters of the last century when it was the most important experimental tool for studying enzyme mechanisms. The rise of molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics in the last three decades has sadly relegated this field to the backwaters of biochemistry. This is distressing, because we have entered the age of systems biology where a thorough knowledge of enzyme kinetics is a prerequisite. Fortunately, whereas the majority of enzyme kinetics texts now languish on dusty library shelves, Athel Cornish-Bowdens Fundamentals of Enzyme Kinetics has managed not only to survive, but to keep up with developments in the field; metabolic control analysis, to my knowledge, is discussed in no other modern enzyme kinetics text. First published in 1979, this much-cited and highly-praised book is now in its 3rd edition.
If you are considering a suitable candidate for a general enzyme kinetics text that will both teach and serve as reference, look no further. This book covers not only all the standard topics, starting from basic principles of chemical kinetics, through steady-state enzyme kinetics, to fast reactions and the estimation of kinetic constants, but also has thorough treatments of the control of enzyme activity and the kinetics of multi-enzyme systems. The treatment of statistical aspects of the estimation of kinetic constants is particularly useful and very clearly written (as one would expect of one of the originators of the direct linear plot, surely one the most elegant developments in the treatment of experimental steady-state kinetic data). In fact, the text as a whole is a model of clarity.
However, if one already owns a copy of Fundamentals, should one upgrade to the new edition? In terms of content, the text itself has been thoroughly revised. A new chapter on tight-binding and irreversible inhibition corrects a deficiency of earlier editions, but I do miss a discussion of the kinetics of suicide inhibition. There a number of new or expanded topics, such as the effects of hydrostatic pressure, mutual depletion kinetics, entropyenthalpy compensation, computer modelling of metabolism, flash photolysis, and magnetic resonance methods for following fast reactions. The literature list has also been updated to include many references to papers published since the 1995 edition. I particularly like the addition of short biographies of key contributors to the development of enzyme kinetics.
There are also a number of cosmetic changes: The text has been re-organised by splitting the treatment of inhibitors: one chapter for reversible, the other one for irreversible inhibition. Effects of pH and temperature now have their own chapters, while solvent isotope effects has been merged into the chapter dealing with uses of isotopes. Specificity has been shifted to the introductory chapter on enzyme kinetics, rather than being treated as an aspect of inhibition. All illustrations have been redrawn and all abbreviations (except obvious ones such as ATP and NAD) have been banished it seems that Cornish-Bowden is as allergic to abbreviations as I am. Should you upgrade? Decide for yourself, but I am glad for the new copy on my shelf.
But, and every book review should contain a but, is this the book that can serve the new wave of systems biology and in silico modelling of cell processes? It is not yet generally appreciated that we need a new enzyme kinetics for this purpose, where it is less important for rate equations and values of kinetic parameters to model the exact catalytic mechanism, but of paramount importance that they not only reflect in vivo conditions but are also written as reversible equations. Although Fundamentals now includes a short section on computer modelling with a discussion of the reversible Hill equation, which is a good example of the sort of rate equation one needs, we still await an enzyme kinetics text dedicated to physiology rather than mechanism.
Prof. Jan-Hendrik S. Hofmeyr, University of Stellenbosch
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