active site of an enzyme; region of an enzyme where substrate molecules bind and undergo a chemical reaction to form products
Organisation of enzyme structure and lysozyme example. Binding sites in blue, catalytic site in red and peptidoglycan substrate in black. (PDB: 9LYZ)
In biology and biochemistry, the active site is the region of an enzyme where substrate molecules bind and undergo a chemical reaction. The active site consists of amino acid residues that form temporary bonds with the substrate, the binding site, and residues that catalyse a reaction of that substrate, the catalytic site. Although the active site occupies only ~10–20% of the volume of an enzyme, it is the most important part as it directly catalyzes the chemical reaction. It usually consists of three to four amino acids, while other amino acids within the protein are required to maintain the tertiary structure of the enzymes.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).