A patient who wanted to go skiing in the Rockies took a medication to combat altitude sickness. A graph of this medication's mechanism of inhibition is shown. What type of inhibitor is this medication?
Competitive
Non-competitive
Irreversible
Allosteric
In noncompetitive inhibition, the Km is not altered, whereas the Vmax is decreased. The drug used to treat altitude sickness is acetazolamide, which is a noncompetitive inhibitor of carbonic anhydrase. The graph is one of a pure noncompetitive inhibitor.
Enzymes