JOANNE STUBBE: The morphological unit of life
is the cell, whether you're a flea or you're an elephant.
Right?
And we all have water as the major solvent.
We all have the same biological molecules that
play a major role inside our bodies, like sugar or fat,
or amino acids, or nucleotides.
We all have the same ways of making reactions
work fast enough so they can succeed inside the cell,
and controlling the specificity, and they're conserved
from bacteria to humans.
We all use the same vitamins on your vitamin bottle.
And those are also conserved in general
from bacteria to humans.
And we also all have the same major regulatory mechanisms,
although as you go from prokaryotes to eukaryotes,
things get more complex.
And so what we cover in the course is, in fact,
most of the things we talk about are bacterial systems
because they're better studied but can be extrapolated
between the two systems.
So are these things ordered inside the cell?
And how do you study them inside the cell?
That's the major focus of a biochemist.
You want to understand things at the molecular level,
but then you need to understand what
you see at the molecular level, how does that relate to what's
going on inside the cell?
And so you need to go back and forth
between inside the cell and understanding
the chemical and physical principles by which all
the reactions work.