Biochemistry and Molecular Biology How Life Works

Pdf Book Name: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology: How Life Works
Author: Kevin Ahern
Publisher: The Teaching Company
ISBN-10, 13: 1629977705
Year: 2019
Pages: 414 Pages
Language: English
File size: 23 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology: How Life Works Pdf Book Description:

Biochemistry is a fascinating subject that explains how all life on Earth functions. Unfortunately, the details of biochemistry often cause students to get lost, and consequently, they don’t get to see the big picture. Without connections to real life, the details simply become things to memorize for tests and are soon forgotten. These lectures were designed to help everyone learn and enjoy biochemistry using explanations of real-world biochemistry problems as tools to understand the subject while still introducing college level biochemistry and not dumbing it down. And without any need for memorization, you won’t spend your time memorizing facts, giving much more time to listen to explanations and think through the concepts. Biochemistry combines biology the science of life and chemistry, the science of molecules. Biochemistry, then, is the molecular basis of life. Every single thing that makes people alive is due to biological molecules and their interactions. The first 24 lectures of this course focus on biological molecules and metabolism, the thousands of different biochemical reactions that are occurring in human cells.

You’ll start by learning some basics about water, the most abundant molecule in the body, in lecture 2. You’ll then move on to amino acids, proteins, and enzymes in lectures 3 through 8. Along the way, you’ll discover how the flexibility of proteins enables everything from speeding up reactions to meeting the body’s needs for oxygen. Lectures 9 and 10 introduce other major biomolecules: lipids and carbohydrates. You’ll learn what metabolic energy is in lecture 11 and how much of it you go through. Then, in lectures 12 and 13, you’ll discover how cells break down dietary and stored carbs and fats to generate the energy your body needs. Lecture 14 will bring all of the cell’s energy considerations together under one umbrella, and you’ll learn how photosynthesis the capture of solar energy by plants is related to metabolic energy generation in humans. Lectures 15 through 19 complete the tour of metabolism by examining how human cells build carbs, fats, amino acids, and cholesterol. In lectures 20 through 24, you apply your biochemical knowledge to fascinating topics that take you well beyond individual cells. These lectures discuss healthy eating and fad diets, the language of cellular communication, the incredible speed of neurotransmission, and the 5 manifestations of neurotransmission that give rise to your senses. The last 12 lectures of the course delve into biological information specifically, the specifications for building an organism and how that information is stored in molecules to be used, maintained, and transmitted to future generations. This is often called molecular biology. Whereas biochemistry focuses on biomolecular reactions, molecular biology covers the underlying cellular architecture that gives rise to the proteins that enable all of the biochemical reactions.