Inhibition kinetics of single--galactosidase molecules with the slow-binding inhibitor D-galactal have been characterized by segregating individual enzyme molecules in an array of 50,000 ultrasmall reaction containers and observing substrate turnover changes with fluorescence microscopy. Inhibited and active states of -galactosidase could be clearly distinguished, and the large array size provided very good statistics. With a pre-steady-state experiment, we demonstrated the stochastic character of inhibitor release, which obeys first-order kinetics. Under steady-state conditions, the quantitative detection of substrate turnover changes over long time periods revealed repeated inhibitor binding and release events, which are accompanied by conformational changes of the enzyme's catalytic site. We proved that the rate constants of inhibitor release and binding derived from stochastic changes in the substrate turnover are consistent with bulk-reaction kinetics.-galactosidase ͉ enzyme kinetics ͉ fluorescence microscopy ͉ single molecule T he emergence of new assays for studying enzymes at the single-molecule level has profoundly extended our view of enzyme mechanisms. Whereas stochastic molecular behaviors are hidden by using bulk methods, single-molecule experiments have revealed that, in a population of enzymes, such as lactate dehydrogenase (1), phosphatase (2), or -galactosidase (3), the catalytic rates of individual enzyme molecules are heterogeneous and do not interconvert quickly. Furthermore, it has been shown that the substrate turnover of individual -galactosidase (4), cholesterol oxidase (5), or lipase (6) molecules undergoes dynamic fluctuations in sequential catalytic cycles. These two variations in enzyme activity are referred to as static and dynamic heterogeneity, respectively, and have both been attributed to different conformational states of the enzyme. Despite such heterogeneity, the Michaelis-Menten model derived from bulk enzyme experiments still holds for single-molecule experiments once a stochastic perspective is adopted (4,7,8).Traditionally, one of the most important tools to elucidate an enzyme's catalytic mechanism has been to study the enzyme in the presence of inhibitors. Here, we set out to correlate inhibition mechanisms established in bulk enzyme studies with singleenzyme molecule experiments. To date, inhibitors have been used in single-molecule studies to obtain information about conformational dynamics. Ha et al. (9) showed that it is possible to distinguish between free and inhibitor-bound states of a single-staphylococcal nuclease enzyme molecule. The binding of an inhibitor imposed a conformational constraint on the enzyme molecule resulting in a change of single-molecule polarization and intramolecular single-pair FRET. In this article, we report the direct observation of inhibitor release and binding from single-enzyme molecules by monitoring their substrate turnover.