AAMC FL Practice Exam

Disable ads (and more) with a membership for a one time $2.99 payment

Study for the AAMC FL Exam. Prepare with comprehensive flashcards and multiple-choice questions, each equipped with hints and explanations. Gear up for your medical school entrance exam!

Each practice test/flash card set has 50 randomly selected questions from a bank of over 500. You'll get a new set of questions each time!

Practice this question and more.

In a Linweaver-Burk plot, what does the y-intercept represent?

1/Km of the enzyme
Vmax of the enzyme
The slope of the line
The half-life of the substrate

The correct answer is: Vmax of the enzyme

In a Lineweaver-Burk plot, the y-intercept is actually indicative of the maximum velocity (Vmax) of the enzyme. This graph is a double-reciprocal plot used to determine kinetic parameters of enzymes, where the x-axis represents 1/[S] (the inverse of the substrate concentration) and the y-axis represents 1/V0 (the inverse of the initial velocity). When plotting the data, Vmax appears in the equation of the line as part of the relationship established by the Michaelis-Menten kinetics, allowing for clear determination of the maximum rate of the reaction. Thus, the correct interpretation of the y-intercept directly correlates to the maximum reaction velocity of the enzyme.