The Proximity Effect
- The proximity effect describes how the enzyme reduces the entropy of the reaction by localizing and orienting
the substrates upon binding
- This localization increases the effective concentration of the substrates, making them more likely to
react. Jencks and others developed a quantitative means of expressing this increase by measuring the rates
of unimolecular and bimolecular reactions. They developed a variable called the effective molarity:
- This ratio produced large values for chemically-similar reactions of single molecule vs. bimolecular
substrates, showing how localization on a single molecule can increase the reaction rate