Chemistry Of Life
Faith Nixon and Corin Nowak
Water
About
Water
Adhesion
Cohesion
Macromolecules
About
Carbohydrates
About
Function
Structuer
example
Proteins
About
Lipids
about
Lipids are molecules that contain hydrocarbons and make up the building blocks of the structure and function of living cells. Examples of lipids include fats, oils, waxes, certain vitamins, hormones, and most of the non-protein membrane of cells.Lipids are not soluble in water. They are non-polar and are thus soluble in nonpolar environments like in choloroform but not soluble in polar environments like water.Lipids have mainly hydrocarbons in their composition and are highly reduced forms of carbon. When metabolized, lipids are oxidized to release large amounts of energy and thus are useful to living organisms.Lipids are molecules that can be extracted from plants and animals using nonpolar solvents such as ether, chloroform and acetone. Fats (and the fatty acids from which they are made) belong to this group as do other steroids, phospholipids forming cell membrane components etc.
Nucleic Acids
About
There are two types of nucleic acids:
• Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which serves as a cellular database by storing an immense amount of information about all the polypeptides a cell can potentially make.
• Ribonucleic acid (RNA), which occurs in several different forms (messenger RNA, ribosomal RNA, transfer RNA) and is needed to convert DNA information into polypeptide sequences; in some viruses, RNA serves as the primary database with no DNA involvement; certain RNAs have catalytic ability similar to that of protein enzymes called ribozymes. Nucleic acids are built from subunits called nucleotides.