Acetylcholinesterase Active Site Mighty Model©

Many common insecticides work by targeting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase. This fold-out model makes the enzyme’s crowded active site more approachable, as it lets students experiment with a magnet-docked substrate (acetylcholine), inhibitor (insecticide), and mutant side chain (serine). Students can immediately intuit how one mutation, Gly119Ser, blocks the insecticide from fitting in the active site.  Through modeling, your students will learn:  The fundamentals of neurotransmission, acetylcholine's role in muscle contraction, and neurotransmitter metabolism  Active site structure-function relationships, how a catalytic triad works, and how amino acids that are far apart in a protein's primary structure can be close together in a folded protein's tertiary structure  Competitive inhibition of active sites, and how substrates like insecticides can be designed to interfere with natural systems  How variations in a population’s genome (i.e. mutations) can become a