What to expect:
This course will be hard if you don’t understand your organic chemistry and if you fall behind on readings. I won’t lie, you’re going to need to sit down and write out the Kreb’s cycle and glycolysis few times (until you understand each step and memorize the steps) if you want to do well in this course.
With that being said, if you do lots of active review, and brush up on your organic chemistry, this course is passable. To do well, you need to understand how different cycles can affect other cycles. Something happening in glycolysis does not only affect glycolysis, as it may affect the Kreb’s cycle, which then could affect the ETC. To be able to spot such patterns and downstream affects, you should not only brute force memorize all the various cycles, but understand why each step in each cycle is needed.
For instance, in the first step of glycolysis, an OH group is exchanged for a phosphate group. This occurs because it will trap the glucose in the call.
To understand which steps are reversible and which aren’t you look at the initial and final energy. If the reaction is exothermic, this step is probably not reversible. If the reaction is endothermic, it’s probably reversible.
And finally, to memorize all those enzyme names, my biochemistry professor told us that enzymes are named based on what they are doing; can you guess what the branching enzyme does? Essentially, if you can memorize enzyme names, it helps you understand what reaction occurs in the step, and vice versa.
It’s all these little tips that helped me in this course. I typically don’t like memorization, but a strong understanding of chemistry means you don’t have to memorize as much.
If terms of assignments, this course has none! There are only 3 exams, each being 33% of your mark. We got practice midterms, but there were not any practice problems. Exams are a mix of multiple choice and long answer.
Overall thoughts
If you want to learn cellular function from a chemical standpoint, I would recommend this course. I didn’t enjoy the lack of depth in biology courses, and I personally enjoy chemistry. But for most people, this course can be hard if you don’t do active review and employ strategies like the ones I mentioned above.