Improvement of student understanding of how kinetic data facilitates the determination of amino acid catalytic function through an alkaline phosphatase structure/mechanism bioinformatics exercise.

Laboratory exercises, which utilize alkaline phosphatase as a model enzyme, have been developed and used extensively in undergraduate biochemistry courses to illustrate enzyme steady-state kinetics. A bioinformatics laboratory exercise for the biochemistry laboratory, which complements the traditional alkaline phosphatase kinetics exercise, was developed and implemented. In this exercise, students examine the structure of alkaline phosphatase using the free, on-line bioinformatics protein-modeling program Protein Explorer.