title: Quasi-steady-state laws in enzyme kinetics.
abstract: To understand how enzymes work is essential for understanding life processes. And, in enzyme kinetics, a fundamental assumption is the so-called Quasi-Steady-State Assumption, which has the history of more than 80 years and has been proven very fruitful in analyzing the equations of enzyme kinetics. Many experimental results and numerical results have shown the validity of the assumption. So, an important problem is if it is always true. If it is always true, then it should be a law, not only an assumption. In this paper, we prove mathematically rigorously that it is indeed always true. Hence, it is a law, and we name it the Quasi-Steady-State Law. Actually, more precisely, we have two Quasi-Steady-State Laws. In one of them quasi-steady state means that the concentration of the enzyme-substrate complex remains approximately constant, and in the other it means that the change rate of the concentration of enzyme-substrate complex is extremely tiny.
authors.affiliation: Center of Bioinformatics & Key Laboratory of Mathematics Mechanization, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, People's Republic of China. libh@amss.ac.cn
authors.forename: Banghe
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Yuefeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D004798:Enzymes / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism*; D007700:Kinetics; D008956:Models, Chemical
chemical_list: D004798:Enzymes