Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes that keep cells and organisms running, and this course builds the foundation for everything else in the program. You’ll start with amino acids and work up through the four levels of protein structure – primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary – including how peptide bonds form and how proteins fold, move, signal, and perform their many roles in the body.
From there, you’ll examine biological membranes: their structure, the lipid bilayer, and the transport proteins and ion channels that control what crosses them. The course then introduces the central dogma of molecular biology – nucleotide structure, DNA replication, transcription, mRNA processing, tRNA charging, and translation – before closing with the core principles of metabolism, including catabolism versus anabolism, metabolic pathways, Gibbs free energy, oxidation-reduction reactions, and how cells regulate enzymatic activity through allosterism and covalent modification.
