Inhibition practice problem
Warning: not for the faint of heart.
Do not try this at home. Methanol poisoning causes blindness
and death
A patient is dropped off in the emergency room and has the following sticker
applied to his forehead.
On his person, the patient has an empty 100 mL bottle of methanol.
Patient is completely comatose.
Your boss seems busy as usual.
He does, however hand you a bottle of 100 proof (50% by volume) whiskey.
Now that you recall from biochemistry, liver alcohol dehydrogenase
catalyzes methanol into the toxic formaldehyde.
Ethanol can be used to
competitively inhibit the methanol poisoning.
Your patient is about 40L.
You assume that both alcohols can
mix well throughout his person, and have a density of 0.79 g/mL
You guesstimate the Km for ethanol to be 1.0 mM.
The Km for methanol is 10 mM.
How much whiskey does the patient need to imbibe to reduce the
activity of LADH to 5 percent?