Science is a Process, not an Object.

Honors Biology Prep

Blog Entries

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Enzyme Cofactors

Many enzymes use "cofactors" to help carry out their function. The one above is a "Heme." We will see a lot of these and similar structures. The ring is called a porphyrin ring. A heme is a porphyrin ring with an iron in it. The iron can carry oxygen molecules. We discussed hemoglobin earlier. That protein carries oxygen in your blood. Or, to be more correct, that protein carries a 4 heme groups, each of which carries an iron, each of which carries oxygen.
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Enolase detail

I thought getting into the mechanism…even just the idea of a mechanism…would be useful. This is a bit of a deep dive into the mechanism of enolase in glycolysis. This enzyme catalyzes the step right before pyruvate kinase, the second "pay-off" or substrate-level phosphorylation step.
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Cells Intro

The image above was lifted from an article in "The Daily Mail," found here.
It is a really bad representative cell, since it is a famous cancer cell line known as HeLa cells and it behaves in ways very much unlike good, normal cells. But, you can see a nucleus (stained for DNA in blue) and some fibers that are part of the "cytoskeleton." To see those, the researchers have used a technique to make them glow either red (microtubules) or green (actin fibers…or microfilaments.
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Protein blog

As I said earlier, a common theme in biology is how large "macromolecules" from subunits, usually known as monomers.
Proteins are arguably the most important and, inarguably, the most diverse of all the macromolecules.
Each protein begins as a long strand of hundreds (or thousands) of amino acids. Since there are 20 different amino acids commonly used, 100 amino acids would have 20100 possible sequences.
In practice, you won't see all possible ones and they are not randomly put together. Instead, the information in the DNA is used to specify what sequence is made (through a process we will learn about).
These chains then fold into complex structures you have seen.
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You are Here

In the same way that one can trace your heritage using your DNA, the evolutionary history of all living things can be fit to a tree of life. You might be surprised where you fall.
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