JOANNE STUBBE: The way we teach the course is we show them
that all of these chemical transformations
can be described by 10 pretty simple steps.
And if you understand the basic chemistry
of these simple steps, you can really understand almost all
of the kinds of interconversions you see and basic metabolism.
And what you'll see is while this looks overwhelming,
really, with a few central pathways,
which is what we focus on in this course-- glycolysis,
fatty acid oxidation, biosynthesis,
sugar biosynthesis as well as degradation, the Krebs cycle,
which feeds into the respiratory chain--
knowing those central reactions--
almost everything in metabolism feeds in and out
of these pathways.
And so then, it really is a question
of what is the environment like and how
do you enhance breakdown of sugar
under the appropriate environment
versus synthesize sugar under a different environment.
So then it's a question of regulation.
So what you're going to learn in this course
is really focused on central metabolism.
And it doesn't matter whether you
study a bacteria or a human, the central metabolism
is pretty much the same.
The thing that's different is the detailed regulation
and the complexity of the regulation.
And we don't really talk that much about regulation in 5.07.
What we do is introduce you to five
or six basic regulatory mechanisms that
are used over and over again.
But then, regulation is really distinct, even
between organisms.
And so then that becomes much more complicated.
And when you go off and become a biochemist,
you've got to study your own system
and figure out what the environment is.