The operating system of life
We began the lesson today summarizing our previous discussion of Organic Chemistry, organic reactions and functional groups. We then began our discussion about biochemistry and the building blocks of biological molecules. The students watched an excellent video comparing a factory to the cell, describing the molecules and machinery to various biochemical molecules which control cellular structure and function (DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates). The experiment asked the students to figure out which types of molecules lead to positive results for three different indicators of sugars (Lugol’s Iodine), lipids (Sudan III) and protein (Biuret Reagent). Most of the students successfully identified the targets of the indicators, which will be used in a later lab to identify various enzymes' functions.
The Dallas Learning Cloud has an outstanding page our students can reference to better understand organic functional groups.
