Introduction to Enzyme and Coenzyme Chemistry

Rating:
Summary: Excellent summary of basic biological reactions...
Review: Bugg has done an excellent job of elucidating the unique characteristics of families of enzymes and reactions. Mechanisms are clearly and plainly represented, complete with pertinent active site amino acid residues.
This book is a formidable adjunct to any biochemistry student's (grad or undergrad) bookshelf. In addition, those interested in nutritional chemistry may find this book interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Good on the more advanced material...
Review: This book provides a concise and readable account of the mechanisms of action of the main classes of enzyme-catalysed reactions; organic chemists familiar with mechanisms for hydrolysis, redox reactions, making and breaking carbon-carbon bonds, and so on, will readily recognize their counterparts in enzyme chemistry. The problems at the ends of the chapters are a particularly attractive feature, as thought has been given to making them intelligent and challenging. At the end of chapter 6 on redox chemistry, for example, the six problems occupy two full pages of the book, enough space being taken to set them out properly without trivializing them; the thoughtful answers given to the same six problems at the end of the book occupy almost another page.

Though in general I liked the last two-thirds of the book, it is worth commenting on a missed opportunity to illustrate why it is useful to know about the different kinds of enzyme inhibition. The well known herbicide glyphosate ("Roundup") acts by inhibiting 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase, but I don't believe that its toxicity is due to the inability of treated plants to make lignin; it kills plants much too fast for that to be plausible, and it seems much more likely that they are killed by the huge increases in the shikimate concentration produced by the type of inhibition, which is uncompetitive, not competitive.

Another attractive feature is the intelligent use of colour in the structural drawings. Some books use colour just because they can, and the essential point of an illustration is lost in a gaudy mass of irrelevant colour. Here, in contrast, the structures are mainly presented in shades of grey, with red and black used to draw attention to particular features. To my mind this works very well, and probably far better than expensive use of a wider range of colours would have worked. Having said this, I'm not sure how far the author really agrees with me, because at the beginning of the book he refers wistfully to the "wide range of colours" available on the computer screen, contrasting with the "only red and black" used in the book.

So far I have concentrated on the things that I liked. Unfortunately the introductory chapters at the beginning are much less satisfactory than the later ones, and I should be reluctant to let a student read these without supervision. The description of the structures of aminoacids could have come straight from a book of the 1960s, and vagueness about ionic structures persists throughout the book.

The treatment of elementary kinetics is similarly unsatisfactory, and includes the common student blunder of supposing that the standard Michaelis-Menten treatment assumes that product formation is irreversible. On the same page, the curve that purports to illustrate Michaelis-Menten kinetics approaches its asymptote too quickly -- another common student error, still encouraged by a depressing number of textbooks. Two pages later we are told that the limit can be "roughly visualised" from the plot of rate against substrate concentration, so presumably the author has been misled by his own drawing, unless by "roughly" he means "very roughly indeed."