Validity of the Michaelis–Menten equation – steady‐state or reactant stationary assumption: that is the question
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Michaelis-Menten equation is generally used to estimate the kinetic parameters, V and K(M), when the steady-state assumption is valid. Following a brief overview of the derivation of the Michaelis-Menten equation for the single-enzyme, single-substrate reaction, a critical review of the criteria for validity of the steady-state assumption is presented. The application of the steady-state assumption makes the implicit assumption that there is an initial transient during which the substrate concentration remains approximately constant, equal to the initial substrate concentration, while the enzyme-substrate complex concentration builds up. This implicit assumption is known as the reactant stationary assumption. This review presents evidence showing that the reactant stationary assumption is distinct from and independent of the steady-state assumption. Contrary to the widely believed notion that the Michaelis-Menten equation can always be applied under the steady-state assumption, the reactant stationary assumption is truly the necessary condition for validity of the Michaelis-Menten equation to estimate kinetic parameters. Therefore, the application of the Michaelis-Menten equation only leads to accurate estimation of kinetic parameters when it is used under experimental conditions meeting the reactant stationary assumption. The criterion for validity of the reactant stationary assumption does not require the restrictive condition of choosing a substrate concentration that is much higher than the enzyme concentration in initial rate experiments.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it