Absolute, Ultimate Guide to Principles of Biochemistry Study Guide and Solutions Manual Seventh Edition

Book Preface

Learning a complex subject, such as biochemistry, is very much like learning a foreign language.

In the study of a foreign language there are several distinct components that must be mastered: the vocabulary, the grammatical rules, and the integration of these words and rules so they can be used to communicate ideas. Similarly, in the study of biochemistry there is a very large (some would say vast) number of new terms and concepts, as well as a complex set of “rules” governing biochemical reactions that must all be memorized. All of this information must be integrated into an interrelated whole that describes biological systems.

Memorizing vocabulary and grammatical rules will not make you fluent in a foreign language; neither will such memorization make you fluent in biochemistry.

Similarly, listening to someone speak a foreign language will not, by itself, make you more capable of producing those same sounds, words, and sentences. The key to mastery of any new subject area, whether it is a foreign language or biochemistry, is the interaction of memorization, practice, and application until the information fits together into a coherent whole.

In this workbook we attempt to guide you through the material presented in Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Seventh Edition by Nelson and Cox. The Step-by-Step Guide to each chapter includes three parts:

• A one- to two-page summary of the Major Concepts helps you to see the “big picture” for each chapter.
• What to Review helps you make direct connections between the current material and related information presented elsewhere in the text.
• Topics for Discussion for each section and subsection in the chapter focus your attention on the main points being presented and help you internalize the information by using it.
• Discussion Questions for Study Groups are questions that are especially suited to Study Groups, either because they pull together several points made in the chapter or because they are more involved questions that would benefit from collaborative insight.

Each chapter also includes a Self-Test for you to assess your progress in mastering biochemical terminology and facts, and learning to integrate and apply that information.

• Do You Know the Terms? asks you to complete a crossword puzzle using the new vocabulary introduced in the chapter.
• Do You Know the Facts? tests how well you have learned the “rules” of biochemistry.
• Applying What You Know tests how well you “speak the language” of biochemistry, often in an experimental or metabolically relevant context.

Two especially popular features of the Absolute, Ultimate Guide are:

• • The Biochemistry Online problems will expose you to just a few of the analytical resources that are available to scientists on the Internet. The molecular models are fun to play with, and many of the questions provide you with an opportunity to analyze “data” as you might in an actual laboratory setting.
• • The Cell Map is based on many semesters of use by our students. It is designed to help you place the biochemical pathways that you are learning about into their proper cellular perspective. The Cell Map questions tell you what to include in your Map, but you can be creative!

Students have told us it is a great study aid, that really helped them to make the connections between the various pathways.

In our experience, this material can best be assimilated when it is discussed in a study group.

A study group is nothing more than two to four people who get together on a regular basis (weekly) to “speak biochemistry.” This type of interaction is critical to fluency in a foreign language and is no less critical in the successful assimilation of biochemistry. We designed our Step-by-Step Guide to each chapter with study groups in mind. The questions posed for each section can be used as springboards for study group discussions. We purposefully have not supplied answers to this section to force you to wrestle with the concepts. It is the struggle that will make you learn the material. In addition, because most of the answers can be readily worked out by a careful reading of the section of the text, the questions will focus your attention on the more important aspects of the material.

Detailed Solutions to all the end-of-chapter textbook problems are included as a separate section in the Absolute, Ultimate Guide.

We have taken great care to ensure that the solutions are correct, complete, and informative. The final answer to numerical problems has been rounded off to reflect the number of significant figures in the data.

We thank each and every one of our students for their invaluable feedback and input, which have helped to make this study guide its absolute and ultimate best.