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Very Short Introductions #661
Enzymes: A Very Short Introduction
Enzymes are the astonishing, tiny molecular machines that make life possible. Each one of these small proteins speeds up a single chemical reaction inside a living organism many millionfold. Working together, teams of enzymes carry out all the processes that collectively we recognise as life, from making DNA to digesting food.
This Very Short Introduction explains the why and the how of speeding up these reactions - catalysis - before going on to reveal how we have evolved these catalysts of such extraordinary power and exquisite selectivity. Paul Engel shows how X-ray crystallography has revealed the complex molecular shapes that allow enzymes to function at an extraordinarily sophisticated level. He also examines medical aspects of enzymes, both in the way faulty enzymes cause disease and in the way enzymes can be used for diagnosis and therapy. Finally, he looks at the many varied ways in which individual enzymes, taken out of their biological context, are used nowadays as tools - in washing powders, food production, waste treatment, and chemical synthesis.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
This Very Short Introduction explains the why and the how of speeding up these reactions - catalysis - before going on to reveal how we have evolved these catalysts of such extraordinary power and exquisite selectivity. Paul Engel shows how X-ray crystallography has revealed the complex molecular shapes that allow enzymes to function at an extraordinarily sophisticated level. He also examines medical aspects of enzymes, both in the way faulty enzymes cause disease and in the way enzymes can be used for diagnosis and therapy. Finally, he looks at the many varied ways in which individual enzymes, taken out of their biological context, are used nowadays as tools - in washing powders, food production, waste treatment, and chemical synthesis.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
165 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 28, 2021
Sometimes, a short, sharp, shock of science is what the body (and mind) needs.
What this is not:
A heavily popularized and humor-laden super-general introduction to enzymes, those wonderful little biological computers performing macros across nature.
What this is:
A general factual overview of enzymes with a few carefully selected examples (from food digestion to detergents for our laundry) with a fairly complete over-overview of the major scientific players in the field.
It doesn't go into any kind of serious detail except in the general layout of the molecular engines and how they were *mostly* accidentally discovered through plain curiosity and discovery, but it does point out that almost every huge breakthrough in genetics came hand-in-hand with enzymes.
Hell, even I knew that DNA and RNA can't cut or splice themselves without enzymes. :)
This is a perfect book for those of us not in the field who nonetheless have some knowledge OF the field. It isn't bogged down by interesting anecdotes or narratives, which, depending on your point of view, is either a Very Good Thing or a Very Disappointing Thing.
For me, I liked it. It's up-to-date, even out the is year, and it gets right to the point.
What this is not:
A heavily popularized and humor-laden super-general introduction to enzymes, those wonderful little biological computers performing macros across nature.
What this is:
A general factual overview of enzymes with a few carefully selected examples (from food digestion to detergents for our laundry) with a fairly complete over-overview of the major scientific players in the field.
It doesn't go into any kind of serious detail except in the general layout of the molecular engines and how they were *mostly* accidentally discovered through plain curiosity and discovery, but it does point out that almost every huge breakthrough in genetics came hand-in-hand with enzymes.
Hell, even I knew that DNA and RNA can't cut or splice themselves without enzymes. :)
This is a perfect book for those of us not in the field who nonetheless have some knowledge OF the field. It isn't bogged down by interesting anecdotes or narratives, which, depending on your point of view, is either a Very Good Thing or a Very Disappointing Thing.
For me, I liked it. It's up-to-date, even out the is year, and it gets right to the point.
January 8, 2021
Overly technical. Does not cover enzymes in food.
December 27, 2024
An excellent book for those looking for an engaging and accessible overview to such an important aspect of contemporary biochemistry. I came to this largely motivated by a desire to revitalize Marxist theorizing on metabolism, as per Hannah Landecker’s suggestion that some 21st century Marxists were not actually good materialists because they don’t actually engage with the most recent metabolic sciences that explain materials and their transformations and are stuck working with the 19th century scientists Marx was reading. This book was a great way in.
Engel early on states in this book why enzymes would be interested to those theorizing with metabolism and interested in materialism (whether dialectical, feminist, and/or decolonial in form, perhaps all three):
“Almost every chemical step in every living thing is guided by its own dedicated enzyme. Out of all the multitude of reactions that might theoretically be possible, enzymes select and guide the orderly sequences of reactions that we call ‘metabolism’, breaking down foodstuffs stepwise to give useful building blocks and reassembling them to make new biological molecules. Whether the sequence of reactions turns carbon dioxide, water, and mineral salts from the soil into a tree or brings about the emergence of a walking, talking human adult from a single fertilized cell, one after another the jigsaw pieces fall into place, unerringly steered by the team of enzymes. Enzymes harness the locked-up energy in some of our foodstuffs or, in the case of plants, the energy of sunlight, and redeploy that energy to drive a vast range of biological tasks. They switch processes on and off. They even make and interpret the DNA instructions. Finally, what makes enzymes themselves? The answer, of course, is enzymes. Nowadays, because enzymes literally control every biological process, many of our drugs are designed to knock out or damp down a particular enzyme activity. They are also increasingly used on their own, outside of their original biological context, as tools, for example in diagnostic kits, in chemical synthesis, in processing foodstuffs, leather, woodpulp, etc…
…If we are going to talk about life in terms of sequences of chemical reactions, we need to ask whether living things carry out the kind of ‘ordinary’ chemistry that we would recognize from our school science lessons. Can ‘ordinary’ chemistry produce the seemingly special substances and structures characteristic of life? And at an even more basic level, what determines whether a chemical reaction can or does occur? How can enzymes influence these processes? How do they all fit together to make up something we can recognize as life?”
Why would Marx be interested in the metabolic sciences? Because he was a materialist and had a stake in combating vitalism, and Engel also goes into this history and disputes over fermentation:
“The death of vitalism and the birth of biochemistry
Despite the early work of Payen and Persoz, vitalism was not finally laid to rest until 1898, when the Bavarian brothers, Eduard and Hans Büchner, announced that not only living yeast cells but also the cell-free juice extracted from broken yeast cells could carry out fermentation. Thus, undeniably, a complex biological process could take place without any living organisms being present. No need then for a mysterious vital force. The resolution of this key issue finally set the stage for the emergence of a formal discipline of biochemistry with its own learned journals and degree courses. Over and over again, in the years that followed, non-living extracts from all sorts of living sources were shown to carry out complicated chemical conversions. These conversions frequently involved a long sequence of many separate chemical steps. When this is so, we call it a metabolic pathway. For each step there is a dedicated, specific agent in the extract that makes that individual reaction possible—an enzyme. It is the existence of precisely the right orchestra of enzymes that makes possible the ordered chemistry that we call life.”
There were a lot of very interesting explanations and insights into metabolism, metabolic pathways, and metabolites. Beyond wanting to better understand metabolism, I came to this book because I wanted to learn about enzymes specifically because I am very interested in an enzyme known as ATP synthase, which is described as a waterwheel or waterturbine used to produce ATP (adnosine triphosphate), the so-called universal energy currency of all life.
It is interesting how often Engel in this book describes enzymes as “machines.” I’ve included numerous excerpts where he does, but the first one summarizes this mechanistic view of life well that was channeled in significant ways through the thought of Descartes:
““As we have seen, enzymes are minute but powerful molecular machines, machines that carry out various sorts of chemistry at phenomenal speed and with extraordinary accuracy.”
“n the same way, to carry out the instructions encoded in the DNA and then to drive all the varied things that we recognize as life, some kind of machinery is needed to make it all happen. This active, executive role belongs to enzymes. But what are enzymes and, beyond the vague statement just made, what do they do?”
“As we have seen in this chapter, there are various patterns of enzyme mechanism and also a variety of structural features helping to achieve the objective. It is, however, worth emphasizing the remarkable outcome. Returning to our earlier example of rate enhancement by carbonic anhydrase (Chapter 2) we can reconsider the ten-millionfold acceleration now in terms of the individual enzyme molecule. If we think of each carbonic anhydrase molecule as a tiny molecular machine, it turns out its product approximately one million times per second! This is a degree of diligent efficiency that is quite difficult to comprehend when compared with typical speeds of human action or even of our own constructed machines.”
“To deal with these matters of economy and hygiene, cells have two distinct systems, each with its own set of proteinases, but once again their destructive potential has to be controlled. In one system, the enzymes are locked away in separate structures in the cell called lysosomes. Like the stomach, these tiny bags of enzyme maintain a much lower pH value than the surrounding cell. Keeping the proteinases in lysosomes achieves two objectives. It means that the current working enzyme machinery of the cell is not exposed to destruction, and it also allows the cell to select and label just those molecules or other structures that need to be sent for recycling. Like the gastrointestinal digestive system, lysosomes have enzymes to break down not only proteins but also other biological structures.
”
“n relation to medical science, we need to think of enzymes in two quite different ways. They may be the problem or they may offer the solution. In the first context, what happens if enzymes are faulty in some way? As we have seen, the smooth running of our bodies relies on many hundreds of different enzymes. Each one is a complex piece of molecular machinery, and, like ordinary machinery, each one can go wrong in a variety of ways, leading to more or less serious clinical symptoms. On the other hand, there are often situations in which we deliberately seek to damp down the activity of normally functioning enzymes in our bodies, and this is how many drugs work. Enzymes, human or otherwise, are also nowadays widely used as agents for diagnosis or therapy.”
“This clever system is, of course, a valuable defence for the bacteria, but recently has taken on a much wider significance. US and French scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier realized that Cas9 could be guided to other kinds of DNA, for instance that in crop plants or even in human embryos, by supplying suitably matching pieces of RNA. Once the targeted DNA is cut inside a living cell, there are natural enzymatic DNA repair mechanisms. These can be guided by a supplied DNA template and this means that the enzyme machinery can be used either to introduce a new mutation or to correct an undesirable mutation. This latter now opens up the possibility of correcting disease mutations… Inevitably it will also raise profound new ethical and regulatory concerns.”
Coming to terms with metabolism as a materialist life science of energy helps us to clarify what it might mean for workers to seize the means of production in the 21st century, and the limits and openings that language has to offer at the scale of molecular machinery found in every living organism on this planet.
Engel early on states in this book why enzymes would be interested to those theorizing with metabolism and interested in materialism (whether dialectical, feminist, and/or decolonial in form, perhaps all three):
“Almost every chemical step in every living thing is guided by its own dedicated enzyme. Out of all the multitude of reactions that might theoretically be possible, enzymes select and guide the orderly sequences of reactions that we call ‘metabolism’, breaking down foodstuffs stepwise to give useful building blocks and reassembling them to make new biological molecules. Whether the sequence of reactions turns carbon dioxide, water, and mineral salts from the soil into a tree or brings about the emergence of a walking, talking human adult from a single fertilized cell, one after another the jigsaw pieces fall into place, unerringly steered by the team of enzymes. Enzymes harness the locked-up energy in some of our foodstuffs or, in the case of plants, the energy of sunlight, and redeploy that energy to drive a vast range of biological tasks. They switch processes on and off. They even make and interpret the DNA instructions. Finally, what makes enzymes themselves? The answer, of course, is enzymes. Nowadays, because enzymes literally control every biological process, many of our drugs are designed to knock out or damp down a particular enzyme activity. They are also increasingly used on their own, outside of their original biological context, as tools, for example in diagnostic kits, in chemical synthesis, in processing foodstuffs, leather, woodpulp, etc…
…If we are going to talk about life in terms of sequences of chemical reactions, we need to ask whether living things carry out the kind of ‘ordinary’ chemistry that we would recognize from our school science lessons. Can ‘ordinary’ chemistry produce the seemingly special substances and structures characteristic of life? And at an even more basic level, what determines whether a chemical reaction can or does occur? How can enzymes influence these processes? How do they all fit together to make up something we can recognize as life?”
Why would Marx be interested in the metabolic sciences? Because he was a materialist and had a stake in combating vitalism, and Engel also goes into this history and disputes over fermentation:
“The death of vitalism and the birth of biochemistry
Despite the early work of Payen and Persoz, vitalism was not finally laid to rest until 1898, when the Bavarian brothers, Eduard and Hans Büchner, announced that not only living yeast cells but also the cell-free juice extracted from broken yeast cells could carry out fermentation. Thus, undeniably, a complex biological process could take place without any living organisms being present. No need then for a mysterious vital force. The resolution of this key issue finally set the stage for the emergence of a formal discipline of biochemistry with its own learned journals and degree courses. Over and over again, in the years that followed, non-living extracts from all sorts of living sources were shown to carry out complicated chemical conversions. These conversions frequently involved a long sequence of many separate chemical steps. When this is so, we call it a metabolic pathway. For each step there is a dedicated, specific agent in the extract that makes that individual reaction possible—an enzyme. It is the existence of precisely the right orchestra of enzymes that makes possible the ordered chemistry that we call life.”
There were a lot of very interesting explanations and insights into metabolism, metabolic pathways, and metabolites. Beyond wanting to better understand metabolism, I came to this book because I wanted to learn about enzymes specifically because I am very interested in an enzyme known as ATP synthase, which is described as a waterwheel or waterturbine used to produce ATP (adnosine triphosphate), the so-called universal energy currency of all life.
It is interesting how often Engel in this book describes enzymes as “machines.” I’ve included numerous excerpts where he does, but the first one summarizes this mechanistic view of life well that was channeled in significant ways through the thought of Descartes:
““As we have seen, enzymes are minute but powerful molecular machines, machines that carry out various sorts of chemistry at phenomenal speed and with extraordinary accuracy.”
“n the same way, to carry out the instructions encoded in the DNA and then to drive all the varied things that we recognize as life, some kind of machinery is needed to make it all happen. This active, executive role belongs to enzymes. But what are enzymes and, beyond the vague statement just made, what do they do?”
“As we have seen in this chapter, there are various patterns of enzyme mechanism and also a variety of structural features helping to achieve the objective. It is, however, worth emphasizing the remarkable outcome. Returning to our earlier example of rate enhancement by carbonic anhydrase (Chapter 2) we can reconsider the ten-millionfold acceleration now in terms of the individual enzyme molecule. If we think of each carbonic anhydrase molecule as a tiny molecular machine, it turns out its product approximately one million times per second! This is a degree of diligent efficiency that is quite difficult to comprehend when compared with typical speeds of human action or even of our own constructed machines.”
“To deal with these matters of economy and hygiene, cells have two distinct systems, each with its own set of proteinases, but once again their destructive potential has to be controlled. In one system, the enzymes are locked away in separate structures in the cell called lysosomes. Like the stomach, these tiny bags of enzyme maintain a much lower pH value than the surrounding cell. Keeping the proteinases in lysosomes achieves two objectives. It means that the current working enzyme machinery of the cell is not exposed to destruction, and it also allows the cell to select and label just those molecules or other structures that need to be sent for recycling. Like the gastrointestinal digestive system, lysosomes have enzymes to break down not only proteins but also other biological structures.
”
“n relation to medical science, we need to think of enzymes in two quite different ways. They may be the problem or they may offer the solution. In the first context, what happens if enzymes are faulty in some way? As we have seen, the smooth running of our bodies relies on many hundreds of different enzymes. Each one is a complex piece of molecular machinery, and, like ordinary machinery, each one can go wrong in a variety of ways, leading to more or less serious clinical symptoms. On the other hand, there are often situations in which we deliberately seek to damp down the activity of normally functioning enzymes in our bodies, and this is how many drugs work. Enzymes, human or otherwise, are also nowadays widely used as agents for diagnosis or therapy.”
“This clever system is, of course, a valuable defence for the bacteria, but recently has taken on a much wider significance. US and French scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier realized that Cas9 could be guided to other kinds of DNA, for instance that in crop plants or even in human embryos, by supplying suitably matching pieces of RNA. Once the targeted DNA is cut inside a living cell, there are natural enzymatic DNA repair mechanisms. These can be guided by a supplied DNA template and this means that the enzyme machinery can be used either to introduce a new mutation or to correct an undesirable mutation. This latter now opens up the possibility of correcting disease mutations… Inevitably it will also raise profound new ethical and regulatory concerns.”
Coming to terms with metabolism as a materialist life science of energy helps us to clarify what it might mean for workers to seize the means of production in the 21st century, and the limits and openings that language has to offer at the scale of molecular machinery found in every living organism on this planet.
May 29, 2022
Paul Engel delivers a fine VSI on enzymes to go with other VSIs on chemistry, biology, and medicine.
The book contains nine chapters:
1 No enzymes, no life
2 Making things happen—catalysis
3 The chemical nature of enzymes
4 Structure for catalysis
5 Enzymes in action
6 Metabolic pathways and enzyme evolution
7 Enzymes and disease
8 Enzymes as tools
9 Enzymes and genes—new horizons
Engel explains how enzymes are essential to life, via the handy trick of increasing the rates of particular chemical reactions by up to millions of times. Enzymes aren't magical - they don't violate the laws of nature. But without them, nothing would be alive, and living things wouldn't be so obviously different in structure and behavior from nonliving things.
This difference confused earlier scientists such as Louis Pasteur, who noted that certain processes such as fermentation and putrefaction only seemed to occur in the presence of living things. This led to the error of vitalism, the belief that the laws of chemistry and physics are insufficient to account for living things, and something extra - a "vital force" (Élan vital) - drove the processes of life.
Engel describes the long, hard work of scientists who developed the field of enzymology (the study of enzymes) and their triumph of reductionism over the prevailing woo of the time. The main tool was to isolate non-living extracts from living cells, and then use these extracts to catalyze the same reactions in laboratory glassware that living cells conducted. At first, nobody knew what was in the extracts, only that it wasn't alive in any meaningful sense. Gradually it became clear that the extracts contained chemicals we now know as enzymes.
Today there is nothing left of vitalism in the field of biology, at least on the level of cells. In every case that can be tested, living things obey exactly the same laws of physics and chemistry as non-living things.
Engel doesn't mention the lingering vestiges of vitalism in psychology, philosophy, the humanities generally, and (of course) religion. Probably most people don't believe physics and chemistry are all there is - certainly no one who prays does. But at least in the realm of test tubes, vitalism lost the war long ago. And scientific progress continues to chew away at the remaining magical beliefs of society, reducing more and more wonders and mysteries to physics and chemistry. (Richard Dawkins wrote a whole book about this, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, which waits stolidly on my massive to-read list.)
After explaining how enzymologists figured out what enzymes are and do, Engel goes on to describe how cells make them (from DNA, by using other enzymes), and how they evolve over geological time.
After grinding through some of the technical details of enzymes, Engel samples their remarkable applications. You've likely heard of these, and perhaps used some of them. In the future, the entire human race might be reshaped by them (such as CRISPR gene editing).
The book is some heavy reading, due to the density of technical concepts and chemical nomenclature. Readers with no background in chemistry may struggle. If you've had at least a college-level chemistry course, you'll manage, perhaps with some re-reading of any confusing passages along with frequent trips to Wikipedia. (Wikipedia seems to have articles on every concept, chemical, scientist, method, and other entity in the book, and many of those articles are excellent.)
Readers approaching this with less chemistry background might wish to read other VSIs first, to approximate the usual order in which college chemistry students get whacked by these topics:
Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction
The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction
Organic Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction
Biochemistry: A Very Short Introduction
And of course there are many college-level textbooks on every aspect of chemistry. Sometimes a longer book makes more sense than a shorter book, when the subject itself is deep.
But the most important thing to keep in mind is that science doesn't always make sense on the first reading. The trick is to keep reading more science - books about chemistry, microbiology, cellular biology, medicine, etc., and then come back to this one for a second reading. The more science you read, the easier reading science becomes, although it might never become completely easy, unless you're one of those 1-in-10,000 outliers in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth.
The book contains nine chapters:
1 No enzymes, no life
2 Making things happen—catalysis
3 The chemical nature of enzymes
4 Structure for catalysis
5 Enzymes in action
6 Metabolic pathways and enzyme evolution
7 Enzymes and disease
8 Enzymes as tools
9 Enzymes and genes—new horizons
Engel explains how enzymes are essential to life, via the handy trick of increasing the rates of particular chemical reactions by up to millions of times. Enzymes aren't magical - they don't violate the laws of nature. But without them, nothing would be alive, and living things wouldn't be so obviously different in structure and behavior from nonliving things.
This difference confused earlier scientists such as Louis Pasteur, who noted that certain processes such as fermentation and putrefaction only seemed to occur in the presence of living things. This led to the error of vitalism, the belief that the laws of chemistry and physics are insufficient to account for living things, and something extra - a "vital force" (Élan vital) - drove the processes of life.
Engel describes the long, hard work of scientists who developed the field of enzymology (the study of enzymes) and their triumph of reductionism over the prevailing woo of the time. The main tool was to isolate non-living extracts from living cells, and then use these extracts to catalyze the same reactions in laboratory glassware that living cells conducted. At first, nobody knew what was in the extracts, only that it wasn't alive in any meaningful sense. Gradually it became clear that the extracts contained chemicals we now know as enzymes.
Today there is nothing left of vitalism in the field of biology, at least on the level of cells. In every case that can be tested, living things obey exactly the same laws of physics and chemistry as non-living things.
Engel doesn't mention the lingering vestiges of vitalism in psychology, philosophy, the humanities generally, and (of course) religion. Probably most people don't believe physics and chemistry are all there is - certainly no one who prays does. But at least in the realm of test tubes, vitalism lost the war long ago. And scientific progress continues to chew away at the remaining magical beliefs of society, reducing more and more wonders and mysteries to physics and chemistry. (Richard Dawkins wrote a whole book about this, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, which waits stolidly on my massive to-read list.)
After explaining how enzymologists figured out what enzymes are and do, Engel goes on to describe how cells make them (from DNA, by using other enzymes), and how they evolve over geological time.
After grinding through some of the technical details of enzymes, Engel samples their remarkable applications. You've likely heard of these, and perhaps used some of them. In the future, the entire human race might be reshaped by them (such as CRISPR gene editing).
The book is some heavy reading, due to the density of technical concepts and chemical nomenclature. Readers with no background in chemistry may struggle. If you've had at least a college-level chemistry course, you'll manage, perhaps with some re-reading of any confusing passages along with frequent trips to Wikipedia. (Wikipedia seems to have articles on every concept, chemical, scientist, method, and other entity in the book, and many of those articles are excellent.)
Readers approaching this with less chemistry background might wish to read other VSIs first, to approximate the usual order in which college chemistry students get whacked by these topics:
Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction
The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction
Organic Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction
Biochemistry: A Very Short Introduction
And of course there are many college-level textbooks on every aspect of chemistry. Sometimes a longer book makes more sense than a shorter book, when the subject itself is deep.
But the most important thing to keep in mind is that science doesn't always make sense on the first reading. The trick is to keep reading more science - books about chemistry, microbiology, cellular biology, medicine, etc., and then come back to this one for a second reading. The more science you read, the easier reading science becomes, although it might never become completely easy, unless you're one of those 1-in-10,000 outliers in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth.
April 24, 2021
It is very short and gives more of an overview than I would like. I was hoping they would be more details on specific enzymes. There are a chapter of two dedicated to this and they are excellent but I wish the whole book was like this.
September 9, 2021
A great example of what you can achieve with the Short Introduction format.
An excellent book, well written, with a lot of interesting topics and details included despite the short page count.
An excellent book, well written, with a lot of interesting topics and details included despite the short page count.
July 2, 2022
A 4hr audio book. This was as the name implies a short introduction, I did not feel I learned anything but I did enjoy the author flow and the readers voice. Over all I think this was a splendid book about what Enzymes are and a brief history of how they got to where they are at.
July 31, 2022
Love biology...great summary.
December 2, 2022
Short and sweet. A VERY readable and understandable text -- this would be great for use in a course where you were teaching basic biochemistry. I would use this instead of a text book any day.
June 23, 2025
Excellent intro, as they mostly are.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews