As noted earlier, Frances Arnold shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in the directed evolution of enzymes-that is, mutating enzymes (altering their original amino acids) to make them work in unnatural environments, to make them catalyze their particular reaction even faster, or to catalyze new reactions they could not hefore. Her lab recently evolved an enzyme to form a C - Si bond, a reaction that no enzyme can do in nature. This new enzyme had a 15 -fold increase in the turnover number for C-Si bond formation compared to the standard homogeneous catalyst used in the chemical industry. What does this mean?
1) Her enzyme lowered the activation energy by a factor of 15 compared to the standard catalyst.
2) Her enzyme could repeat its reaction a total of 15 times compared to just one time for the standard catalyst.
3) It would take 1/15 of the enzyme concentration to do the job compared to the standard catalyst.
4) The number of reactions per second done by her enzyme was 15 times that of the standard catalyst.
