Biochemistry In Biology

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Before chemistry could contribute adequately to medicine and agriculture, however, it had to free itself immediate practical demands in order to become a pure science.
The subject of study in biochemistry is the chemical processes in living organisms, and its history involves the discovery and understanding of the complex components of life and the elucidation of the pathways of biochemical processes. Much of biochemistry deals with the structures and functions of cellular components such as proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic-acid and other biomolecules; their metabolic pathways and flow of chemical energy through metabolism; how biological molecules give rise to the processes that occur within living cells; it also focuses on the biochemical …show more content…

Boyle questioned the basis of the chemical theory of his day and taught that the proper object of chemistry was to determine the composition of substances. John Mayow observed the fundamental analogy between the respiration of an animal and the burning, or oxidation, of organic matter in air. Then after sometime when Lavoisier carried out his fundamental studies on chemical oxidation, grasping the true nature of the process, he also showed, quantitatively, the similarity between chemical oxidation and the respiratory process. On the late 18th century, a biological phenomenon that occupied the attention of the chemists—PHOTOSYNTHESIS. The demonstration, through the combined work of Joseph Priestly, Jan Ingenhousz and Jean Senebier, that photosynthesis is essentially the reverse of respiration was a milestone in the development of biochemical …show more content…

Subsequent work demonstrated that the production of ATP was associated with respiratory (oxidative) processes in the cell. In 1940 F.A Lapmann proposed that ATP is the common form of energy exchange in many cells, a concept now thoroughly documented. ATP has been shown also to be a primary energy source for muscular contraction.
The use of radioactive isotopes of chemical elements to trace the pathway of substances in the animal body was initiated in 1935 by two U.S. chemists, R. Schoenheimer and D. Rittenberg that technique provided one of the single most important tools for investigating the complex chemical changes that occur in life processes. At about the same time, other workers localized the sites of metabolic reactions by ingenious technical advances in the studies of organs, tissue slices, cell mixtures, individual cells, and, finally, individual cell constituents, such as nuclei, mitochondria, ribosomes, lysosomes, and

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