BIOL 108 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Olive Oil, Lard, Polysaccharide
Document Summary
Biomolecules overview, carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, topic outline. 4 major classes of biologically important molecules: carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids. Carbohydrates: are sugars, and polymers of sugars, are typically composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the ratio (ch2o)n, simple sugars are called monosaccharides. Note that the ose suffix denotes a sugar: disaccharides are slightly larger sugars consisting of 2 covalently-linked monosaccharides. Examples are sucrose, lactose: polysaccharides are polymers of monosaccharides. These can be very large: our digestive enzymes will readily break the bonds in starch and glycogen, but not those in cellulose, chitin is an anomalous polysaccharide found in insect and crustacean exoskeletons and fungal (cid:272)ell (cid:449)alls. Its (cid:373)o(cid:374)o(cid:373)er (cid:272)o(cid:374)tai(cid:374)s (cid:374)itroge(cid:374) (cid:894)u(cid:374)like a typi(cid:272)al (cid:272)ar(cid:271)ohydrate(cid:895). Lipids: this group includes several types of molecules, some of which are rather different from each other structurally. What lipids have in common is that they are all hydrophobic.
