Cytosociological Aspects of Enzyme Action

Abstract

The scope of this Workshop has shown us something of the breadth of existing knowledge, regarding the metabolic infrastructure of the living cell. Over the years, many of us in attendance have been admonished and rebuked for advancing the kinds of concepts and principles at issue here. For, the opponents have argued, the marriage of cell biology and enzymology attained a consummate finality long ago — during the early days of differential centrifugation. The fruit of this early marriage has been a reductionistic period largely dominated by the “grind-and- find” study of isolated enzyme activities. According to this “classical” view, the organization of cell metabolism exhibits a simple bifurcation: whereas a certain (reproducible) fraction of the cellular enzyme constituency appears to be rather permanently associated in (or on) specific membranous elements (e.g., as “marker enzymes”), the majority of the enzymes of intermediary metabolism are homogeneously dissolved in the cytosol (i.e., the 100,000xg supernatant) or in the “plasm” of organelles (e.g., mitochondrion). Sadly to say, this picture continues to be promulgated in present-day biochemistry textbooks — which treat enzyme organization only as a passing fancy.