Plant science discovered first-ever enzyme and kick-started biochemistry

Plant science is vital for our food security and in our fight against climate change. What’s less recognised is that plant research is equally important to generate new knowledge to advance research and innovation across all disciplines. However, general disregard for plant research is proving to be highly detrimental as prospective young scientists often overlook plant science.

Plant research has been central to breakthroughs that have enabled technological advances that we enjoy today. Therefore, I’m writing a series of blog posts to highlight a few significant findings from research in plants. So far, I wrote about how plant science discovered cell biology, the Brownian motion, osmosis and virology.

Here, in the fifth post of the series, I discuss the role that plant science played in the discovery of the first-ever enzyme. Most enzyme names end in “-ase”, and it was plant science that set precedence for the classification of enzymes. These early scientific studies in plants paved the way for a new research area of enzymology and biochemistry.

Biological catalysts

Remember science classes in secondary school? We all learnt about enzymes — often described as biological catalysts (or biocatalysts); these biological molecules…