Rapid kinetics of both glucose-6-P uptake and hydrolysis in fasted rat liver microsomes were investigated with a recently developed fast-sampling, rapid-filtration apparatus. Experiments were confronted with both the substrate transport and conformational models currently proposed for the glucose-6-phosphatase system. Accumulation in microsomes of 14C products from [U-14C]glucose-6-P followed biexponential kinetics. From the inside to outside product concentrations, it could be inferred that mostly glucose should accumulate inside the vesicles. While biexponential kinetics are compatible with the mathematical predictions of a simplified substrate transport model, the latter fails in explaining the "burst" in total glucose production over a similar time scale to that used for the uptake measurements. Since the initial rate of the burst phase in untreated microsomes exactly matched the steady-state rate of glucose production in detergent-treated vesicles, it can be definitely concluded that the substrate transport model does not describe adequately our results. While the conformational model accounts for both the burst of glucose production and the kinetics of glucose accumulation into the vesicles, it cannot explain the burst in 32Pi production from [32P]glucose-6-P measured under the same conditions. Since the amplitude of the observed bursts is not compatible with a presteady state in enzyme activity, we propose that a hysteretic transition best explains our results in both untreated and permeabilized microsomes, thus providing a new rationale to understand the molecular mechanism of the glucose-6-phosphatase system.