What affects enzyme activity?

Enzyme activity is dependent on five different factors. These include temperature, pH, concentration of substrate, concentration of inhibitor and concentration of the enzyme itself. Firstly, most enzymes are temperature-sensitive and will only work in certain temperature ranges. This same concept applies to pH, where specific enzymes function only at a specific pH. An example where this is important are the different enzymes working in different parts of the digestive system. When it comes to the different concentrations, you can see the enzyme as a robot working on assembling cars. When the concentration of the enzyme is higher, there are more robots, so the job gets done faster. When there are inhibitors (robots that don't work or cheeky employees that prevent the robots from working), the formation of the product (production of cars) will be slower. Finally, the concentration of the substrate isn't that simple. When you first increase the number of parts you have, the robot will have more parts to work with for assembling cars and therefore you will keep it busy and many cars will be produced. However, if you have more parts than robots and the robots can't make use of all the parts, then there are extra parts that aren't being used. If we look at this in a substrate-enzyme context, then if there are too many substrates they can compete with one another and this will reduce the enzyme activity.