Overview:

This is an introductory course in biochemistry, designed for both biology and chemical engineering majors.

A consistent theme in this course is the development of a quantitative understanding of the interactions of biological molecules from a structural, thermodynamic, and molecular dynamic point of view. A molecular simulation environment provides the opportunity for you to explore the effect of molecular interactions on the biochemical properties of systems.

This course assumes that students have taken introductory chemistry, including basic thermodynamics, as well as introductory organic chemistry. An introductory biology course is not a prerequisite for the course, but students would benefit from some prior exposure to biology, even at the high school level. Required mathematical skills include simple algebra and differential calculus.

The two main learning goals of the course are:

The course begins with amino acids and transitions into protein structure and thermodynamics. Protein-ligand binding is treated for both non-cooperative and cooperative binding using immunoglobulins and oxygen transport as examples. The enzymatic function of proteins is explored using serine and HIV proteases as examples. Enzyme kinetics is treated using steady-state kinetic analysis. Enzyme inhibition is treated quantitatively, using HIV protease as a key example.

Carbohydrate and lipids are presented in sufficient depth to allow the student to fully understand major aspects of central metabolism. The discussion of metabolism is focused on energy generation, fermentation, and metabolic control.

The course concludes with an extensive section on nucleic acid biochemistry. The focus of this section is to provide the student with sufficient background so that they are literate in the recombinant DNA technologies as they relate to protein production using recombinant methods.

After a treatment of molecular forces and solution properties, the course builds on molecular and energetic descriptions of fundamental monomeric building blocks to develop a comprehensive understanding of the biological function of polymers and molecular assemblies at the molecular and cellular level. In addition to multiple case studies, the course concludes with a capstone exercise that leads students through the steps required to produce recombinant proteins for drug discovery. The major topics in the course are:

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Biochemistry