I happened upon a new kind of fun: an enzyme party! The first invitation will be sent to rubisco (ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase for anyone playing at home), a kind old friend and a bit of a celebrity, having been featured by the RCSB Protein Data Bank in November of 2000 as the molecule of the month.
Rubisco, which is integral to the Calvin cycle, is the most abundant protein in plants but is an extraordinarily slow enzyme, with each molecule catalyzing only 3 reactions per second. That makes it four to six orders of magnitude slower than enzymes in the carbonic anhydrase family.
The image above is from here.
