Enzyme Inhibition
Sometimes an enzyme is used to make a useful product. However, there are cases where the microorganism has sufficient quantities of these good materials. It would be wasteful to continue to make more product that is needed. It would be nice to have a way to ‘turn off’ enzymes.
One way is by end-product inhibition of enzyme action. This is also known as allosteric inhibition.
In this case, the end product changes the shape of the enzyme so that it can no longer work. Since the relationship between end products and enzymes are reversible, once the microorganism has used up the end products, inhibition stops. Then enzymatic action starts again. This is illustrated in Appendix 4.