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JOANNE STUBBE: Hi, everybody.
You're in 507, and if you look at your syllabus,
you'll find one of the things in the front page of your syllabus
is called a lexicon.
And I'd like to introduce you to why
we've chosen to have a lexicon for this course.
So if you look at this particular slide or overhead,
this is what John is going to teach you
this semester-- introductory metabolism.
The glycolysis pathway, fatty acid biosynthesis,
fatty acid oxidation, amino acid metabolism.
A complete jungle.
How are we ever going to learn anything out of this mess?
Well, that's actually exactly the point.
So what we're going to do over the course of the semester
is convince you that all of this mess
can be simplified to 10 basic reactions.
And those 10 basic reactions are what's in the lexicon.
So it turns out all of biochemistry
for primary metabolism can be described
using 10 different sets of reactions and your vitamin
bottle.
And so if you look at your vitamin bottle,
what do you see?
Most of you probably take vitamins.
You have vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin B3, vitamin B6,
vitamin B12.
All of those provide enzymes the catalysts
for all the reactions in this complex metabolic pathway
I showed you on the previous slide.
They expand the repertoire of reactions
that enzymes can actually catalyze.
And so within the lexicon, what we're going to show
you is the chemistry of actually how these vitamins work.
So again, if we come back to the lexicon,
we'll talk about how carbon-carbon bonds are
made and broken, fatty acid metabolism, sugar metabolism.
We'll talk about oxidation reduction reactions
and the vitamins that are used for that transformation.
We'll talk about the energy storage and the energy currency
in the cell-- ATP, etc.
So what the lexicon is meant to do
is be an aid when you can't remember what
does oxidation and reduction?
You can go back to your lexicon and look up
what are the redox cofactors that
are involved in transformation.
And by practicing the chemistry in the first part
of the semester of all these reactions,
metabolism should be very straightforward
in terms of all the connectivities.
So hopefully what you will do is look through your lexicon
tonight, see what these reactions are,
and then keep it by your side during the rest
of the semester.
And when you're having trouble understanding
some chemical transformation, you
can use the lexicon as a guide to think about the chemical
transformations that you'll be looking
at over the course of the semester.