Final Report Summary - SMS ENZYME (Exploring Structure-Function Relationship of Enzymes at Single Molecule Level: Fluorescence and Force Spectroscopy) This project aimed to study the activity of a single enzyme. As an enzyme we used DNA in DNA-templated reactions. We could monitor the activity of this single enzyme and show that when the template was unstructured , it behaved as an ideal Michaelis-Menten enzyme (as taught in classical biochemistry text-books): the distribution of cycle times was exponential. However when the DNA template was structured, the enzyme displayed non-exponential behaviour as also observed in real enzymatic reactions. This demonstrates that the hoping of the DNA enzyme between various metastable conformation resulted in a non-classical Michaelis-Menten behaviour.
