Interesting Biochemistry Website

The website that I found interesting was www.sciencedaily.com. There are articles here relating to all fields of science. In a quick search for biochemistry topics it produced an article on quantum dot spotlighting DNA repair proteins in motion and early Alzheimer detection. It has great color pictures and access is free.

What knowledge have you connected with past knowledge?

As we learned from the first post, biochemistry is a multidisciplinary view of the molecular nature of life. This class has overlapped with the information presented in several classes that I have attended in the past. Biology presented the cellular structure and function of plants and animals. General chemistry provided a view of the interactions of individual molecules to create larger molecules. Organic chemistry presented carbon bonded functional groups and their interactions. All of these concepts have been revisited in our initial studies of biochemistry.

Find a protein using PDB explorer - describe your protein, including what disease state or other real-world application it has.

Utilizing the key word diabetes in the pdblite.org the site provided an article with a protein. The code associated with the protein is 1kzw. It is described as the human intestinal fatty acid binding protein which binds lipids in the cytosol of enterocytes. It is a naturally occurring nucleotide polymorphism.
This protein exhibits secondary traits of helixes and pleated sheets (visualized as green crayons and tan arrows respectively on diagram). It has no subunits and therefore no quaternary traits.
The amino acid sequence would be useful for research in comparing the structure and function of one sequence to that of another. Similar sequences may combine, react, substitute in the same way therefore allowing for predictions of unknown or underresearched sequences.

On the pdblite.org site two views of the molecule are available. The all atoms shows the entire molecule including side chains whereas the backbone view does not show the side chains.

What is biochemistry, and how does it differ from the fields of genetics, biology, chemistry, and molecular biology?

Biochemistry is an intergration of the fields of biology and chemistry. It is the study of the chemical processes in living organisms dealing with structure and function of cellular components including proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids and other biomolecules (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochemistry). Biochemistry demonstrates the complexity of the parts and processes completed by even the smallest organism. Biochemistry differs from the fields fo genetics, biology, chemistry and molecular biology because it draws on many of these disciplines to answer questions about the molecular nature of lifeprocesses (Campbell and Farrell, 2008). Although many of these fields appear unrelated they are in fact related and together can provide a clearer picture of a complex issue.

Sources:
2008, Campbell and Farrell, Biochemistry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochemistry