- Which sugars did Emil Fischer synthesize, and what did that prove about molecular structure?
Metabolism
The chemical processes that sustain life in organisms.
- How did Meyerhof's work on lactic acid chemistry parallel Hill's findings on muscle heat?
- What role do bile acids play in digestion?
- What shared molecular structure did Wieland find underlying bile acids?
- How long did it take Wieland to work out the structure of bile acids?
- What structural connection did Windaus establish between sterols and the fat-soluble vitamins?
- How does ultraviolet light convert ergosterol into vitamin D?
- Why were the tools available before X-ray crystallography so blunt for working out cholesterol's molecular structure?
- How did Arthur Harden discover that phosphate was essential to fermentation?
- What are coenzymes, and what role do they play in glycolysis?
- How did Harden and von Euler-Chelpin's separate work converge into a single theory of fermentation?
- In what sense did this research found the field of metabolic biochemistry?
- How did feeding raw liver to anaemic dogs lead Whipple to a therapy for pernicious anaemia?
- How did Szent-Györgyi's work on biological oxidation set up the discovery of the citric acid cycle?
- How did X-ray-induced mutations reveal which gene controlled which metabolic step?
- How does a radioactive isotope let scientists track a molecule's path through a living plant or a human bloodstream?
- Why do modern biochemistry textbooks depend on isotope tracing to map metabolic pathways?
- What is the Cori cycle, and how does it connect glycogen in muscle to glucose stored in the liver?
- How did the 1946 Lasker Award anticipate Cori's 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?
- Why did understanding the Cori cycle become important for diabetes research?
- What is the Cori cycle, and how does lactic acid from exercising muscle get converted back into stored glycogen in the liver?
- Why was Gerty Cori's 1947 award notable for being the first Nobel Prize in science won by an American woman?
- What sequence of reactions did Hans Krebs identify between glucose breakdown and the release of carbon dioxide?
- What role does coenzyme A play in linking fats, carbohydrates, and proteins into a single metabolic pathway?
- Why has the citric acid cycle remained essentially unchanged across roughly two billion years of evolution?
- How do disruptions to the Krebs cycle contribute to diseases such as cancer and metabolic disorders?
- Why did the protein-plus-cofactor architecture Theorell found turn out to be a general principle across enzyme biology?
- What did Theorell's later work on alcohol dehydrogenases reveal about how the liver processes alcohol?
- What raw material does the body start from when it synthesises cholesterol, and how many enzymatic steps does the full pathway take?
- How did Konrad Bloch and Feodor Lynen, working separately in Chicago and Munich, map the same pathway?
- Why is cholesterol indispensable to the body despite its reputation for causing disease?
- How did mapping the cholesterol synthesis pathway lead to the development of statins?
- How did studying lactose digestion in bacteria lead Jacob, Lwoff, and Monod to discover gene regulation?
- What are sugar nucleotides, and why does the cell need them to build complex carbohydrates?
- How does UDP-glucose drive the assembly of glycogen and cellulose inside cells?
- What kinds of diseases result when the sugar nucleotide pathways Leloir described malfunction?
- How did John Cornforth use isotopically labelled hydrogen to trace enzyme reactions despite being deaf?
- What is the chemiosmotic hypothesis, and how does a proton gradient across a membrane drive ATP synthesis?
- Why did biochemists in the 1960s resist Peter Mitchell's idea that energy coupling was hydraulic rather than a chemical intermediate?
- Why did it take seventeen years between Mitchell's 1961 proposal and his 1978 Nobel Prize?
- What is the difference between the inner-sphere and outer-sphere mechanisms of electron transfer that Henry Taube identified?
- Why were the reactions of metal ions in solution poorly understood before Taube's work in the 1950s?
- How does Taube's electron-transfer chemistry explain the corrosion of pipes and bridges?
- In what way did Taube's discoveries help explain how metalloenzymes function?
- What is the LDL receptor and what role does it play in clearing cholesterol from the blood?
- Why does familial hypercholesterolaemia cause heart attacks in children?
- How do cells sense and regulate their own cholesterol production through feedback loops?
- How did the discovery of the LDL receptor pathway lead to the development of statins?
- What specific work on LDL receptors and cholesterol metabolism earned Brown and Goldstein both awards in the same year?
- What does Marcus theory predict about the rate of electron transfer between molecules?
- How long did it take before experiments confirmed Marcus's predictions?
- What hypothesis led Akira Endo to search fungal cultures for a cholesterol-lowering compound?
- What did clinical trials in the late 1970s show about statins' effect on LDL cholesterol and heart attacks?