The section

on pre-steady-state kinetics was another example, in this case because the earlier panel had no experts in this area. This would seem to be an important area for the IUBMB to consider, but any new recommendations would need to be prepared by specialists, not simply as part of the task of a group responsible for enzyme kinetics as a whole. Non-Michaelis–Menten kinetics has become a far less active area of current research than it was in the 1970s, and although the 1981 recommendations this website were not at all detailed they may be sufficient for present needs. The discussion of types of mechanism seems only peripherally linked to the main topic of the recommendations. If updated this section should be dealt with separately, and should take account of the terms used by organic chemists to classify mechanisms. As long as

only a few enzymes were known to biochemists it mattered very little if these were named in an ad hoc fashion by their discoverers as invertase, Zwischenferment, malic enzyme and so on, but by the middle of the 1950s it was clear that this unsystematic approach could not continue without producing utter confusion. Two proposals of ways of classifying enzyme-catalysed learn more reactions later became the basis of the classification scheme adopted by the IUBMB (Dixon and Webb, 1958 and Hoffmann-Ostenhof, 1953). Already in 1958 the first edition of Enzymes ( Dixon and Webb, 1958) listed 659 enzymes, far too many Glutamate dehydrogenase for unsystematic names to be intelligible. When the last printed edition of Enzyme Nomenclature ( IUBMB, 1992b) appeared in 1992 this number had grown to 3196,

and at the time of writing this introduction it is 5588, and continues to increase. To overcome the risk of imminent chaos, the IUB set up the Enzyme Commission in 1956 6 which presented its Report in 1961 ( IUB, 1961), in which a classification of enzyme-catalysed reactions into six groups. The Enzyme Commission itself was replaced in 1961 by the IUB Standing Committee on Enzymes, and its work is now the responsibility of the Nomenclature Committee of the IUBMB. Despite these changes in responsibility, however, the original classification has been maintained, and the system today is the same as that of 1961. In part for that reason, and also because the prefix EC is still used in enzyme numbers, the term “Enzyme Commission” is still often used, though the commission it refers to ceased to exist more than half a century ago.