Michaelis and Menten and the long road to the discovery of cooperativity

This article sketches the road from the establishment of the principles of enzyme kinetics, at the beginning of the 20th century, to the discovery of regulatory mechanisms and the models to explain them, from the middle of the century onwards. A long gap in time separates the two periods, in which technological advances were made that allowed the discovery of feedback inhibition and cooperativity. In particular, these discoveries and the theory needed to explain them could not have been made without knowledge of the major metabolic pathways and the enzymes and metabolites involved in them. (C) 2013 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.