We've discussed some aspects of biotechnology already, but we have yet to discuss the promising field of synthetic biology. We are now able to manipulate biological organisms in ways that have technological applications, and one of the...

CREDITS Animation & Design: Bing Rijper Narration: Dale Bennett Script: Gemma Young It might be hard to believe, but at the very start of your life you were a single, microscopic cell called a zygote. Your body now contains millions of...

Enzymes are really important proteins, that speed up the rates of reactions such as in photosynthesis, respiration and protein synthesis. The enzymes and substrates are always moving, and occasionally they collide at the right speed and...

mRNA Processing: The 5'-7-methylguanosine Cap

Let’s fly to Eukarytopia, the home of the eukaryotes! You can learn all about plants in the Garden of Babylon! This lesson will begin our series on eukaryotic cells. We’ll look at the structure of plant cells, focusing on components...

What are enzymes? Why they're nature's little factory workers. They chop up certain things! They build up others! Pretty amazing the kind of chemistry nature can do given enormous polypeptide chains with unfathomable variability and...

We've already learned about Mendelian genetics, which taught us about dominant and recessive alleles and the laws that govern their inheritance. But things are not always so simple. There are situations that go beyond this basic...

We live in a time where there is much skepticism towards modern medicine. This stems purely from ignorance, however, and there are those who capitalize on this to sell an unbelievable array of alternative medicines that, almost without...

Glycolysis and Gluconeogenesis Regulation

So, what causes mutations? Well, this is where science fiction meets science fact, sort of. In the backstory of many superheroes there will be a meeting with a radioactive substance - be it cosmic rays or radioactive waste. In real life,...

Learn the basics about the principle of green chemistry that concerns catalysis, as a part of environmental chemistry. A catalyst increases the rate of a chemical reaction. This means that desired products can be made more quickly, using...