Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Three Major Themes

Carbohydrates is a group of carbons that consist of sugar, starch, and fiber which is contained of carbons, hydrogen, and oxygen. Carbohydrates is a component that provides energy through food calories such as; fruits, grains, and pasta. Another word that is used for sugars is saccharide. There are three types of saccharides, mono which contains one sugar molecule, di which contains two, and tri which contains three sugar molecules.  One of the most important sugars that is in monosaccharide is glucose which is created by photosynthesis. Another saccharide that creates many of sugars that are combined into a chain are polysaccharides. This is also known as starches what you see in foods such as pasta and potatoes as mentioned above.

Amino Acids is the building block of proteins. Amino acids forms together to form peptides (2 or more amino acid bond together) and polypeptides bonds. There are 20 amino acids found in protein. Taught in organic chemistry and biochemistry there are L and D forms. L forms active proteins of eukaryotes and D forms active proteins of prokaryotes. There was a type of hormone that was mentioned from Dr. Prescott in biochemistry it was a one small peptides hormones such as oxytocin. This hormone induces labor and controls contraction and also stimulates flow of milk after labor.

DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA is stored as code made up of  Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine. DNA is attached to a sugar and phosphate molecule that is called nucleotide. DNA is a double helix formed by base pairs (AGCT) attached to a sugar-phosphate backbone. We also discussed in class how the process works the way DNA is translated and is transcribed into RNA.

These three major themes that I thought were important to discuss. These themes were taught in my previous science classes and now again in relating to biochemistry.



3 comments:

  1. It seems we all have come to similar conclusions about what the main themes for the course were. Metabolism is another component of what we did, at least in my opinion, but as I said in my own comments, it all goes together in a couple of different ways.

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  2. Yes i agree, I was looking over the other students blogs and I saw that we all have similar answers. I agree that metabolism is another component of what we did. I mean all these topics that were mentioned are used in all of our science classes.

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  3. I enjoyed the fact that the DNA was discussed so many times and simultaneously with Genetics. DNA replication, transcription, translation and protein synthesis was repeatedly explained which helps in understanding it and making sure to really know the processes.

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