Rate constants are an extremely unpopular area in biology, mainly because it is an undergraduate biologists first real contact with numbers. However, in principle they are very simple, they refer to the kinetics of a system which measures how fast reactions take place. This is a very important tool in biochemistry because one of the central means of investigating biological systems is to change the system in some way and then see what happens. Changes in rate are one of the best ways of accurately describing what happens.
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