Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Nature precisely controls thousands of chemical reactions in every cell. Many of these form complex chains of reactions, analogous to a falling line of dominoes: when an enzyme triggers the first reaction of a chain, the other reactions are triggered inm sequence. Such reaction cascades an be difficult to recreate outside living systems. Even when the same catalysts are used as those that evolved in nature, it is frequently not possible to achieve the naturally occurring reaction rates when cascades are carried out in a test tube. Writing in Angewandte Chemie, Megarity et al.1 report a solution to this problem that mimics a naturally occurring strategy for promoting efficiency: the co-localization of cooperating catalysts.