Cytosol-mimetic chemistry: kinetics of the trypsin-catalyzed hydrolysis of p-nitrophenyl acetate upon addition of polyethylene glycol and N-tert-butyl acetoacetamide.

The sensitivity of an enzyme to its environment has provoked much interest both for its immediate relevance to biochemistry and for the use of enzymes in chemical synthesis. The intercellular or extracellular environment in which an enzyme naturally operates is crowded with macromolecular, small-molecule, and ionic solutes and hence is markedly different from the dilute aqueous buffer solutions commonly cited for comparisons of biochemical processes. We report the results of a kinetic study into the effects of such a crowded solution on the rate of an enzyme-mediated process-the trypsin-catalyzed hydrolysis of a nonnatural substrate ester. The catalytic rate constant decreases linearly with solvent polarity, but substrate binding is independent of the concentration of added crowding agent up to 395 g/L.