biochemistry

[mdsquared]

---

Members do not see this ad.

Is there any organic chemistry involved in a biochemistry class? In my school organic I and II are prerequisites, and I have only taken organic chemistry I. Has anyone taken biochemistry without having completed org chem I & II?

 

[Arsenic]

I guess it would be possible but it would probably be a lot more difficult and confusing. Org 2 is usually a pre req because Org 2 is all reactions and mechanisms and some of those pop up a lot in Biochem.

 

[Noeljan]

In my opinion yes, Organic chemistry helps a lot before taking biochem. You will be able to visualize things better, also structures, chirality, reactions, stabilities. I think it helped a tremendous amount. Doing very well in Organic made doing well in biochem a lot easier (as compared to some of my friends who had a harder time in organic and then in biochem). This is my opinion though, I wouldn't take biochem without organic.

 

[MedicineBird]

Is there any organic chemistry involved in a biochemistry class? In my school organic I and II are prerequisites, and I have only taken organic chemistry I. Has anyone taken biochemistry without having completed org chem I & II?

I took Biochem and Ochem II simultaneously. Sometimes it was beneficial and other times it was a serious pain in the a$$ playing catch up. It's doable but takes work.

 

[Skaterbabe74]

I think your best bet is to ask around your school. I took Biochem I at the same time as Orgo II and there wasn't any orgo in my biochem class. There was a slightly better discussion of how to name/draw carbohydrates in Orgo II but we didn't get to that chapter since I took it over the summer. And my biochem class didn't have any reactions or mechanisms...our prof didn't believe mechanisms were appropriate for a biochem I course (plus the class was only 3 weeks long 🙂.) But things like acylation and alkylation were actually explained better in biochem than they were in orgo so I really think it just depends on the classes and texts used.

Good luck!

 

[faradayampere]

When I took biochem, we did not do any rxn mechanisms at all ... and there is no correlation between how well you do in biochem and how well you perform in organic chem [I personally think]. Biochem is about memorization (well, 99% of the time), while organic is more critical thinking

 

[Noeljan]

I dont understand how a biochem course could not involve any reactions when that is what biochemistry is, reactions. Sure it is memorization, but the pathways and reactions come a lot easier if you understand them. Basically the more reactions you understand the less you have to memorize in terms of pathways and what is going to happen next. I don't mean any offense, but maybe it is taught very different at different universities. I thought there was correlation because I did very well in organic, and did not have to work that hard in biochem because I was able to visualize and think about things (thanks to organic) I cannot say the same for people I know. If they had a hard time in organic they often had a hard time in biochem. Not always, but usually. Or they had to work harder to get down the basics.

 

[UCLAstudent]

I agree with Noeljan. My biochem class involved a ton of organic chemistry. Without organic chemistry, you will have to strictly memorize reaction mechanisms, as opposed to understanding why and how each reaction occurs. This could be problematic when exams roll around. The professor knows that each student has (or should have, hahaha) memorized the glycolytic mechanisms and can thus nail a question that asks for the conversion of DHAP to G3P, for example. On my exams, the questions were not glycolytic/citric acid cycle mechanisms, but, rather, things that we had never seen before but could answer based purely on the understanding of previously discussed mechanisms. Hope this makes sense. 🙂

 

[DrHopeless]

For my BioChem class, there wasn't all that much Organic, except for a few nucleophilic attacks in DNA polymerization and some in Topoisomerase (wait a min, isn't all orgo is just one type or another type of nucleophic attack?? haha it is 1 AM I can't think). Of course you have to draw structure and recognize basic thing like transesterfication. But beyond that it didn't require that much knowledge of Orgo, but it certainly help. Then again my teacher SUCKS!!! I do this 😴 pretty much every single class Read the book is the only way, hopefully you will have a much better teacher.

ps: forgive my spelling of some of the orgo/biochem terms, it is 1 AM and I don't care

 

[dmoney41]

It probably does vary by school, but I was really good at organic chemistry and still found that, in general, it was a hell of a lot easier to just memorize names rather than thinking about the actual molecules involved. The prof showed all the mechanisms (arrows and all) but I never looked at any of them and still got an A.

The exception to orgo knowledge is that it is useful to know organic nomenclature. Not the IUPAC crap they teach you with the 1,4- and the high priority groups and whatever, but the old school nonsensical crap that they used when they were coming up with this stuff. It made memorizing infinitely easier that I didn't have to memorize the words "glucose", "glucose 6-phosphate", "fructose 6-phosphate", blah blah, "phosphoenolpyruvate", but could instead think of it as "first throw a phosphate on 6, then do an isomerization to a ketose, then throw another phosphate on", etc. I could then just generate the names on the fly, which is why I only spent about 20 minutes on each pathway.

Actually I guess that's a pretty solid argument for orgo 1 if you can't pick that up on your own outside of class. Orgo 2 is as about useful as tits on a bull, though.

 

[ShyRem]

my biochem class DID have reactions, and ochem II was very helpful. I also agree that biochem is a TON of memorization. Being a chem major and definitely NOT a bio major, I found biochem to be a bit challenging in that regard. Then again, everyone else in the class already had genetics and a lot of other bio, so they had a much easier time - I felt like I was doing the work of four classes just to keep up with everyone else. (I console myself with my A's in P-chem.) We were required to reproduce molecules, mechanisms, prosthetic groups, activators/inhibitors, you name it. I had a friend take biochem at another university during the summer - she couldn't believe the stuff we had to learn.

My biochem class was definitely not something you could sleep through and pass.

 

[DieselPetrolGrl]

I guess it would be possible but it would probably be a lot more difficult and confusing. Org 2 is usually a pre req because Org 2 is all reactions and mechanisms and some of those pop up a lot in Biochem.

dood did u have hjuing 1st yr?
hes the shizzy
i love UM biochem dept 😍

 

[DrKT2009]

Is there any organic chemistry involved in a biochemistry class? In my school organic I and II are prerequisites, and I have only taken organic chemistry I. Has anyone taken biochemistry without having completed org chem I & II?

The biochemistry courses that I took were very much organic chemistry based. Out of the four that I did take, one of my profs used organic more so than the others; however, he had also taught honors organic chemistry in the past -- the other ones were more math based with kinetics and enzyme competition and such. I have found that the biochemistry course structure (whether organic based) will depend on whether or not your prof thinks it is highly important or not (you can see if your prof has ever taught organic chemistry or whether or not his type of research depends on organic chemistry). I do, however, believe that knowing organic well makes things much easier in biochemistry (helps with all of the pathways), but it will depend on how much emphasis your prof puts on organic as to how much you will have to know. With my class, we had to know all of the enzymes and how they interacted with the molecules and how all of the mechanisms worked with the enzyme complexes and metal complexes etc... It made knowing organic well a must. Even if your biochemistry course does not put as much emphasis on organic, I do think at least the problem solving thinking process involved in organic will help you a lot in your biochemistry class. Best of luck

 

[Arsenic]

dood did u have hjuing 1st yr?
hes the shizzy
i love UM biochem dept 😍

No, we had Boehmer,Whelan, and Goldberg for medical biochem. Did you "love" any of those professors individually or just the entire department? 😱