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.
