What is Rate limiting step in Biochemistry during metabolism?
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Let’s say that the “biological process” is prepping a newsletter for my garden club and getting it into the mailbox. The process involves: printing the newsletter, stuffing the envelopes and carrying them to the mailbox.
My printer can print 125 copies of the newsletter per minute. I can stuff 10 envelopes per minute, and it takes me 2 minutes to carry a box of 500 envelopes to the mailbox. Printing and taking the envelopes to the mailbox is very fast. However, I can’t get more than 10 envelopes done per minute because that’s as fast as I can stuff them. The speed of the other steps doesn’t matter because the envelope stuffing is slow and limits how many I can get out – the rate limiting step.
It’s the same in biochemistry, if you have a series of chemical reactions, and one is slower than the others, the whole process is slowed down to the speed of the slowest step in the process.
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