Lesson 3: The Four W's

WHAT IS GOING ON!?

 

The Four W’s of Biochemistry 

 

Brought to you by: A Biochem Student

So by this point you have (hopefully) gotten everything that you need for this class. (By this point you also might be close to the end of the class and desperate to improve your grade to the point where you are actually reading this Blog). Whatever your reason for reading this is it all comes down to GETTING THE GRADE! And in order to get the grade you need to know what is important and what is not.

So how do you figure out what is important or not? Well other then going to class and figuring out what your teacher emphasizes in lecture there are a few other ways to find what you need to know. These are:

THE FOUR W’s

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You probably remember these from your parents when you were trying to go out with your friends. “Where are you going? What are you going to be doing? Why are you going? When are you coming home?”

Well biochemistry has something similar: for each mechanism that you learn you want to ask yourself these five important questions. ( I will be addressing them in each following lesion also.)

Where is the pathway happening?

            Is it in the liver or the muscle? The cytoplasm or the mitochondria? 

When is the pathway active?

            Does this happen after you have eaten a huge whale or when you are starving to death on some desert island?

Why is the pathway present?

            Is it so you don’t end up with syrup blood or to make sure ammonia in your blood doesn’t kill you? 

WHAT CAN GO WRONG?

            If you damage this enzyme or the DNA coding for this enzyme can the person still live? Is there a disease associated with this problem? Is it something like lactose intolerance or is it something more problematic like PKU?

These are your four W’s of biochemistry and from this point onward it is important that you are able to answer these questions for each of the pathways that both your teacher and I will be going over in the following lessons. By doing this you will get a good feel for what is important and what can be skimmed over.

I will be addressing these questions for glycolysis in the next lesson, so get your pencils ready because it’s time to start the real biochemistry now!

Lesson 2: What You Need to Succeed

  I want the best grade with minimal effort, what do I need to do that?

 

A Supply List for Students Who Care

 

Brought to you by: A BioChem Student

 

So what do you need to succeed in Biochem? Well everyone is different but there are a few things that anyone will need to do well in this class.

•  TIME – if you don’t have time to dedicate to this class then you will not do well, you need to be able to put aside at least a couple hours a day aside to go over notes and even more then that the closer you get to the test. If you are okay with a C in the class then you can probably manage with having less time available to you, but if you want that A then I suggest not taking more than 2 other (300 or 400 level) classes on top of this class (3 if they are easy 200 level classes).   



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• GO TO CLASS – I cannot stress this enough, if you are a person who never goes to class and tries to scrape by through studying the text book THIS WILL NOT WORK FOR THIS CLASS. Why? because there is a lot of material (as mentioned in Lesson 1) and the book will give you a good chunk of it with no hints as to what is important and not. BY GOING TO CLASS YOU CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO THE TEACHER! You don’t have to take notes if you don’t want to, but just recording or noting KEYWORDS that the teacher says or emphasizes for you to look up and learn on your own latter will ensure that you are truly prepared for the tests.

• TEACHER’S INFO – Know when your teachers office hours are and what their e-mail is, I promise you that at least once in your time in this class you will need them so make a note of them on the front of your notebook so you know where they are fast if you ever need them.

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• BOOK – there are a number of good Biochemistry book and a number of BAD biochemistry books out there. In most cases your teacher has likely assigned you a text book to use. In my personal opinion the best Biochem book I have ever had or used was Lippincott’s Biochemistry, I have the 4^th edition and it is relatively cheep (as far as text books go) if you order it on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Biochemistry-Lippincotts-Illustrated-Reviews-Series/dp/160831412X

 Or you could of course go for something a little less conventional,

 though i don't know how well that would help you! =)

• ONLINE RESOURCES – Some of your teachers will set up online pages for the course, these are handy for review and if you did not understand something from lecture, I suggest going onto the site the first week of class to familiarize yourself with it and determine if it will be any help to you. http://www.genome.jp/kegg/ is also a good resource but it can get over whelming very easily, If you do use this use it to form your OWN pathway maps! Having your own that you can follow will do you more good then the complicated ones on the website or book.

• BIG PIECES OF SKETCH PAPER – why the heck would I need this? Well! The thing is, the mechanisms you will learn are LONG and COMPLICATED and ANNOYING (for the most part) so you can have lots of normal sized paper with different portions of the pathways in very small handwriting OR you can have these big pieces of paper with the mechanism in full on them with lots of nice big writing on them so you can actually understand them. It’s up to you but I would go with the big paper any day.

 A DRY ERASE BOARD - This will allow you to draw pathways over and over and over until your eye bleed and they are etched into you heard never to leave again. It is actually one of the best ways to study for this class (as i have found) since if forces you to draw the structures again and again along with  the enzyme names and co-factors. Repetition is key after all!!

 A mirror also works for this =) 

(note image is not mine, in fact none of the images are)

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Things that you don't really need but but that might be handy anyway

•  Recorder or a recording app – these are handy because they let you go back through the lecture and make sure you didn’t miss anything (biochem teachers go FAST not because they want to but because there is so much material that they have to)
• Colored markers or pencils – if you’re someone that color helps you remember things then having a special color for all the molecules, the branch-chain that is changing, co-factors, and enzymes might help you do better on the tests.
• A study group – These can help you a lot but be warned that they can also hinder you. Make sure you make time for you to study alone and only meet up with a group to study after you think you have a good grasp of the concepts. Groups can help solidify these concepts but when the group is fighting over how a mechanism works it will only lead to confusion and worse grades for everyone. 

Next Lessons: Questions to Study By and Intro to Glycolysis and Gluconeogenisis, what you really need to know.

Lesson 1: Non-Memorization Studying

 There is so much! How am I supposed to remember all of this!!

 

A Students Guide to Non-Memorization Studying

 

Brought to you by: A Biochem Student

 

When most people think about metabolism they think about the food there eating and likely how much weight they are going to gain by eating it. But we are Biochemistry students and so when we think about Biochemistry with think about THIS:

http://www.genome.jp/kegg/pathway/map/map01100.html

Daunting isn’t it? Well thankfully for us we are not expected to know this whole thing, in fact I’m sure none of your professors even know the whole thing. Memorizing everything on this chart is an impossibility, memorizing sections isn’t, though it is still a difficult task. In fact my recommendation for anyone reading this is to NOT memorize it! 

“Not memorize?” you are probably thinking, “But how else are we supposed to learn this stuff?!” (You are also probably thinking I’m a little bit crazy, but let me explain)

You see memorization can only get you so far in Biochem, and YES you will have to memorize some things, but if you UNDERSTAND 1) what you need to do, 2) where you are coming from, 3) where you are going and 4) have an idea of how to get there, then you will be far more will off then the people trying to memorize every single name, structure, and enzyme.

An example of this? Well just look at the breakdown of Amino Acids, there are so many pathways that you can take in the breakdown of one amino acid, not to mention all of them. There are so many options and steps that if you tried to learn them before a test you would fail. Here is an example of JUST Glycine, Serine, and Threonine:

 http://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00260

A lot ha? Well instead of memorizing all of that what you can do though is learn patterns. This is where the non-memorization studying comes in. For most amino acids (NOT ALL) you first want to remove the NH2. You could memorize the name for the enzyme that does this for all 20 amino acids, or you could know that an aminotransferases (sometimes called a transaminase) catalyze this reaction but moving the NH2 to another biomolecule as shown below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transaminierung.svg

You could also memorize the structure of all the α-Ketoacids that this reaction forms of you can just remember that the NH2 is replaced with a ketone (O= ) where the NH2 used to be. 

So the take home message of this segment is as follows:

DO NOT NOT NOT MEMORIZE EVERYTHING!! If you can understand the generalizations and the few acceptations then you will be good to go!

If you have any questions/opinions or if  anything that i post is incorrect in anyway i would love to hear from you. So feel free to leave a comment!

Next Lesson: What you need to succeed and Questions to study by.