Learning Strategies in Biochemistry:

Some Aids for Reviewing Important Concepts from General and Organic Chemistry

Revised 2008/05/22


Most biochemistry texts start with review of important concepts from general and organic chemistry. Take these reviews seriously -- the time you spend recovering some basic chemistry skills will pay off in easier development of new skills in biochemistry. Here are a couple of additional aids:

Writing Reaction Mechanisms ("Electron Pushing")

Few biochemistry texts give you review of the important skill of electron pushing -- that at-first obscure but powerful tool for making clear just what's happening in a reaction. And though I find it hard to believe, some organic instructors do their students the great disservice of not requiring them to learn how to write mechanisms. Here's a great book for helping you gain or regain this skill:

Electron Movement: A Guide for Students of Organic Chemistry, Daniel P. Weeks, 2nd ed., Saunders College Publishing, NY 1992.

This book is a self-guiding tutorial that will have your writing complex mechanisms before you can say "Merrwein-Pondorf-Verley-Oppenauer redox reaction."

Review Organic and Preview Biochemistry, In One Painless Operation

Search the beginning of your course topics page for "Chapter Zero", your first reading assignment. In it, you'll learn lots of neat things about the metabolism of fats, while you review structure, stereochemistry, and reactions from earlier chemistry courses.

As an alternative, there is an older version of Chapter Zero, based on glycolysis as the context and source of all examples. You can get your hands on it, and get yourself a lot of additional biochemistry problems to solve, by buying this relatively inexpensive book:

The Biochemistry Student Companion, Allen J. Scism, Prentice Hall, Inc. NJ. ANY EDITION WILL DO, but the latest is 4th Edition, 2006 (ISBN 0-13-147605-X).

Finally, here's a great site for reviewing specific topics in organic chemistry.

Quiz (after one class discussion of Chapter Zero)

Quiz (ten minutes) will consist of no more than five questions, taken from among the questions included in Chapter Zero. The questions will be in short-answer format.


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Biochemistry Resources