enzyme in our body/organs?

Question

pse tell me more about enzymes. is it everywhere in our organs like throat, liver, stomach, or ??? i am very ignorant on biology

Answer 1

in biochemistry, Enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. That is the basic difference between a chemical reaction that happens in the body vs one that you might try in a test tube.
A catalyst by definition is a substance that participates in a chemical reaction to make it happen faster or go more towards completion without being consumed in the reaction.
So enzymes are proteins that make chemical reactions "go" (as opposed to structural proteins that just hold things together) (RNA also has been shown to have enzymatic activity but that's getting ahead of ourselves here)
Given that everything that happens in the body is basically a chemical reaction, from duplication of DNA to building muscle fibers to converting the food you eat to energy and waste, enzymes are everywhere in the body. Many many different enzymes in every single cell do different things.
Digestive enzymes which the answer talks about are only a small example of enzymes which are involved in breaking down the food as it passes through the digestive tract.
To demonstrate the complexity of this process here is an example:
when you open a soda bottle, there is a spontaneous reaction that converts the Carbonic Acid in the soda to water and Carbon Dioxide gas which bobbles out. There is a family of enzymes in the body called Carbonic Anhydrase which can increase the rate of this reaction back and forth to 1 million times per second. This enzymes works in the red blood cell to help oxygen and CO2 transport, it works in the kidney to help balance the pH of urine and control waste excretion, and a million other places. Drug that inhibit this enzyme in the kidney can be used to lower blood pressure, in the eye to treat glaucoma.

in summery:
enzymes are proteins.
they catalyze chemical reactions making them go "faster" and/or "better"
a lot of different ones are present in every single cell (and some outside of cells) in the body

basically you have to think about this in a smaller scale, not body and organ, but cells and molecules.

Answer 2

Most enzymes in our body occurs in the digestive tract, starting with our saliva. Enzymes are very specific and occur at differing rates and differing places for a variety of reasons.