Hey, it's professor Dave, let's talk about biochemistry.
What is biochemistry? Is it biology? Is it chemistry?
Well as you might guess, it's sort of in-between, quite literally in terms of
size. In the great panoply of the sciences, biochemistry sits right here.
If we go smaller we get into small molecules made of just a few atoms which
is chemistry, and even smaller than that we get to the particles that are even
smaller than a single atom, and that's particle physics. If instead we go much bigger
we are looking no longer at individual molecules, but entire cells or parts of a
cell. That's biology. Right in between is biochemistry.
This is the domain of large biomolecules like proteins and DNA, and the things
they can do. Is it important to understand? You better believe it.
Anything that has to do with nutrition, medicine, or general health is rooted in biochemistry.
That's because nutrition has to do with metabolism, the chemical process by which
molecules in your body break down the food you eat. Your health is governed by
biochemistry as well, since all diseases have a molecular basis. When you really
get down to it, you are just a bunch of molecules, so we need to know what they all do.
That's why the domain of biochemistry is so often misunderstood. Everywhere you
look there is misinformation. Diet fads, medical hoaxes, and pseudoscience from
every direction. Many people, when looking at their own health even try to step
away from science completely, opting instead for unsubstantiated alternatives.
But this is a poor strategy, because the status of everything in your body is
governed by large biomolecules like enzymes, receptors, and DNA. These are
molecules that biochemists understand very well, and we all need to learn about
them if we want to have any kind of clear picture about what goes on inside the body.
Unfortunately you can't understand biochemistry without understanding the
basic chemistry that it breaks down to. What these large biomolecules do is
fundamentally the same stuff we learned in general
and organic chemistry, it's just a bunch of plus and minus charges that make
chemical reactions happen. So if you are watching this series to supplement your
undergraduate biochemistry course and you remember your basic chemistry,
you're all set to move forward. If you are someone that just wants to learn
more about how the human body works but you haven't learned much chemistry, here
is a list of other tutorials from my general chemistry playlist and organic
chemistry playlist that you really will want to watch first in order for any of
this to make sense.
I promise this is the bare minimum, and I also promise that if you understand
these, everything in this series will be pretty easy to understand. When we see a
picture of, say, an enzyme, and it looks like a weird tangled blob, we draw it
that way to save time, because there are hundreds or even thousands of atoms in
it, which would be impractical to draw out individually using the line notation
we are familiar with. But we absolutely must be able to understand this enzyme
on the molecular level, so we can know what functional groups it's made of and
how it does basic chemistry. Otherwise biochemistry seems like magic, but it's
not, it's just many surprisingly simple chemical reactions, even if they are
applied in complex ways and on huge molecules. My goal with this series is to
focus on the basic concepts of biochemistry and illuminate them for the
student and the common viewer alike. I may occasionally mention details that
aren't that important to non-students, and I also may gloss over some of the
more technical details.
This is in hopes of keeping everyone engaged. But for anyone who might be
viewing these tutorials, if you focus on gaining the big picture of all these
biochemical processes working together to create the complexity of life, you
will emerge much wiser at the end of the playlist.
Whatever you do, don't get discouraged watch more than once if you need to, and
as always feel free to email me with any questions you might have:
Now let's learn some biochemistry!