Which statement about hydrolases is true?

Prepare for the Microbial Metabolism Test. Utilize flashcards and multiple choice questions with helpful hints and detailed explanations. Ace your test with ease!

Hydrolases perform hydrolysis: they use water to break chemical bonds, splitting larger molecules into smaller ones. This group includes proteases that cut peptide bonds in proteins, glycosidases that break sugar bonds, lipases that cleave ester bonds in fats, nucleases that sever bonds in nucleic acids, and phosphatases that remove phosphate groups, among others. Because hydrolysis can act on many different bond types across numerous substrates, there are many distinct hydrolase families described in enzyme classifications—more than 200. The other ideas don’t fit because oxidation reactions are carried out by oxidoreductases, not hydrolases, and hydrolases do not generally catalyze condensation (ligation) reactions. Hydrolases also act on a broad range of substrates, not only proteins, extending well beyond peptides.