BIOL1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Polysaccharide, Starch, Disaccharide
Document Summary
Nutrients are the molecules that living organisms require for survival and growth but that animals and plants cannot synthesize themselves. Animals obtain nutrients by consuming food, while plants pull nutrients from soil. Foods such as bread, fruit, and cheese are rich sources of biological macromolecules. The term macromolecule was first coined in the 1920s by nobel laureate hermann staudinger. Staudinger was the first to propose that many large biological molecules are built by covalently linking smaller biological molecules together. Living organisms are made up of chemical building blocks. All organisms are composed of a variety of these biological macromolecules. Biological macromolecules play a critical role in cell structure and function. Most biological macromolecules are polymers, which are any molecules constructed by linking together many smaller molecules, called monomers. Typically all the monomers in a polymer tend to be the same, or at least very similar to each other, linked over and over again to build up the larger macromolecule.
