Learning About Biochemistry- Biochemistry an Introduction

 

                                    

Learning About Biochemistry

Biochemistry an Introduction

What is biochemistry? Is it biology? Is it chemistry?

Well as we might guess, it's sort of in-between, quite literally in terms of size. Biochemistry is just here in the broad variety of sciences.

If we go smaller we get into small molecules made of just a few atoms which are 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. 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 the body break down the food we eat. Our health is governed by biochemistry as well since all diseases have a molecular basis. When we really get down to it, we are just a bunch of molecules, so we need to know what they all do.

Why biochemistry is often misunderstood?

That's why the domain of biochemistry is so often misunderstood. Everywhere you look there is misinformation. 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. Those are all molecules that biochemists are quite familiar with, and we all need to learn about them if we want to have a clear understanding of what happens inside the body.

How Biochemistry is related to General chemistry?

Unfortunately, we 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.

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. However, we have to be able to understand this enzyme at the molecular level to know what functional groups it is built of and how it performs basic chemistry.

Otherwise, biochemistry appears to be magic, but it is not; it is a collection of very simple chemical processes, even when used in complicated ways and on large molecules.