Active Site Adventures

Enzyme diagrams usually show one substrate sliding neatly into an active site, and leave out what makes enzyme activity hard to predict: look-alike molecules that do not fit, inhibitors that block the active site or reshape it from elsewhere, and conditions that bend the enzyme itself. In this game you are the enzyme, moving through a crowded cytoplasm where pH, temperature and substrate concentration all decide how well you work. Later levels scale up to glycolysis, where ten enzymes turn glucose into pyruvate, and to glycogen synthesis, where glucose is joined into storage.