Speak of the devil....

...and the devil, he shall appear.

A recent discussion at the Curious Wavefunction briefly touched upon the role of (macro)molecular crowding in biochemical studies.  I am presently preparing to see whether a certain set of experiments are feasible, and in some of the potential tests, I am adding a fair amount of crowding agents to my samples. 

The samples that have those crowding agents are presently the only ones that exhibit any enzymatic activity.  The other samples are dead, biochemically speaking.  One of the "dead" samples does exhibit complex formation in one of my alternate tests, but that's it.  Further tests are needed, of course, and it's certainly possible that I can retain enzymatic activity in the other samples upon logically adjusting my current protocols.  But perhaps there's a lesson here to be learned.