advice for biochem

[smileystudent87]

taking biochem this fall semester and obviously want to do as well as possible to keep my gpa up any advice on what i should know going into the class? what can i learn beforehand ik its a very rigorous course so i wanna prepare

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[Ryxndek]

If anything, my advice as a freshly graduated Biochem major. You could try and work on memorizing and being able to draw the amino acids. Knowing their 1 and 3 letter codes. Know Pkas and how the specific amino acids will be affected if placed in acid or base or neutral solutions.

Depending on your course, what worked for me was drawing everything out. I wrote out all the pathways and tried to connect them together. So I had a huge page of pathways with everything interconnected. It helps out things into perspective and makes it bigger picture.

It’s tough to go ahead and start learning things before being thrown in. But the amino acids will put you ahead by a little bit. Since they’re the building block of biochemistry. Good luck! Biochem is super fun and interesting!

 

[smileystudent87]

If anything, my advice as a freshly graduated Biochem major. You could try and work on memorizing and being able to draw the amino acids. Knowing their 1 and 3 letter codes. Know Pkas and how the specific amino acids will be affected if placed in acid or base or neutral solutions.

Depending on your course, what worked for me was drawing everything out. I wrote out all the pathways and tried to connect them together. So I had a huge page of pathways with everything interconnected. It helps out things into perspective and makes it bigger picture.

It’s tough to go ahead and start learning things before being thrown in. But the amino acids will put you ahead by a little bit. Since they’re the building block of biochemistry. Good luck! Biochem is super fun and interesting!

do u think biochem or orgo is more challenging? i enjoyed orgo bc of the logic, it was like learning a language. is biochem like that?

 

[Ryxndek]

do u think biochem or orgo is more challenging? i enjoyed orgo bc of the logic, it was like learning a language. is biochem like that?

Not necessarily. It’s similar in that it uses principles of organic chemistry but it has more biology incorporated. So rather than being asked a question like determine a possible product given a set reaction mix, you might be asked “how is this amino acid affected when a valine is substituted for an apartic acid if at a pH of 3? And you’ll need to understand organic chemistry concepts like acids and bases but also how the protein structure will be changed and how that might affect an organism. You could also be asked questions like “what does this enzyme do in this specific pathway, or how might a specific mutation affect this protein?

It shares similarities and differences but they’re not the same. I might argue that biochem is harder since there’s a lot more to memorize compared to organic chemistry, where once you knew how certain reactants react given a certain circumstance then it follows that all the time.

But it’s fun, if you did well in ochem, chances are you can do well in Biochem. There’s lots of good resources available

 

[Ryxndek]

I would like the stress though that at my university, biochemistry majors take a different Biochem class than everyone else. And my profs stressed to us that the level we were learning at was equivalent to medical school. How true that is I have no clue lol. But we dove pretty far in depth compared to other classes.

So chances are your class won’t be as notoriously hard as mine. So don’t stress too much about the class. I’d rather take Biochem all over again than some other classes I took lmao