Neal Woodbury

Office: BDA 130E Email: Nwoodbury@asu.edu

Phone: 965-3294 Office Hours: Monday 11:40 – 12:30 and Thursday 2:00 – 2:50

Lecture time: MWF 10:40 AM – 11:30 AM in LL 2

Teaching Assistants: Jason Lappe (Jason.Lappe@asu.edu) and Joel Yates (Joel.Yates@asu.edu), office hours: LRC PSH137, Weds 11:40 AM to 12:30 PM (Jason), Thursday 12:40 PM – 1:30 PM (Joel) and Friday 9:40 AM – 10:30 AM (Joel)

Required Textbook: Biochemistry 3^rd Edition by Garrett & Grisham (2005) Saunders College Publishing.

Website: http://www.public.asu.edu/~laserweb/woodbury/classes.htm

Here you will find detailed reading assignments, a study guide, lecture outlines, etc.

Grading: There will be three Midterms that will each be 20% of the grade and a Final Exam that will be 40% of the grade. The first part of the final (about a third of it) will cover the last section of the class. The rest will be comprehensive. I evaluate the results of exams, etc. and make small adjustments to the grading scale depending on performance, however, I will guarantee that anything greater than or equal to 90% is an A, 80% a B and so on.

Lectures: Most of your lectures (at least 80%) will follow the book closely. Every now and then I will give a relevance lecture. By this I mean that the lecture will take material from either things currently happening in the world (e.g. the AIDS epidemic) or biochemical issues of common life (e.g., dieting and your body’s control of food intake) or aspects of biochemistry that raise ethical concerns (e.g., in-body sensing systems that record all aspects of your biochemical record). You will be responsible for this material. The material in these lectures is not covered in the book, so you need to come to class. Sometimes I will point you to reading material on the web that you can access. I will provide an outline of material covered on the web for all of my lectures, but there is no guarantee that all of the material given in class will be in this outline. You need to come to class. ON-LINE LECTURE NOTES ARE OFTEN UPDATED THE NIGHT OR MORNING BEFORE THE LECTURE!! MAKE SURE YOU DOWNLOAD UPDATED VERSIONS!!

Reading: In a class like this, by far the best way to learn is to read the material AHEAD of the lecture. It really makes a huge difference if you are familiar with some of the terms when you hear the lecture and you can effectively ask questions to help you understand what was not clear in the reading. DO THIS AND YOU WILL SAVE TIME IN THE LONG RUN AS WELL AS IMPROVE YOUR RETENTION. ON-LINE READING ASSIGNMENTS ARE OFTEN UPDATED ONLY ABOUT A WEEK IN ADVANCE!! LOOK AT THE WEB PAGE TO KEEP UP-TO-DATE!!

Exams: There are old exams you can use for practice, but these may not cover exactly the same material as the current exams due to shifts in timing and material covered. Tentative reading assignments are given for the entire semester with a few exceptions, but these may change as we go through the course, so please check and get the updated assignment within a week of the date. Format on exams will be part multiple choice, part short answer or fill-in and usually one or two more detailed questions that test your ability to put different aspects of biochemistry together to solve problems. If you miss an exam for a legitimate reason (if you are ill, there is a death or life threatening illness in your immediate family or you go on an ASU sanctioned trip), then contact as soon as you know what is going on (for an ASU sanctioned trip, that should be a couple of weeks in advance). We will work something out. If you have to miss more than one of the midterm exams (due to an excused absence) or the final, you generally will receive an incomplete for the course. The Final Exam is comprehensive.

Tentative Lecture Schedule:

Note: the schedule for which chapters are covered when is just an estimate – a detailed reading assignment list is on the web and will be updated as the course proceeds. The exams, however, will occur on the dates shown. Because the schedule is tentative, the topics covered by each exam may not be exactly those indicated here.

Date	Material

1/18	Introduction and thermodynamics of carbon
1/20	Chapter #7 Carbohydrates
1/23	Chapter #7 Carbohydrates
1/25	Chapter #8 Lipids
1/27	Chapter #17 Intro to metabolism
1/30	Chapter #17 Nutrition
2/1	Chapter #18 Glycolysis
2/3	Chapter #18 Glycolysis/ Review and Summary
2/6	Review and summary
2/8	Exam #1
2/10	Chapter #19 TCA cycle
2/13	Chapter #19 TCA cycle
2/15	Chapter #9 Membranes
2/17	Membrane Potentials (hopefully a review)
2/20	Chapter #9 Membrane Transport
2/22	Chapter #20 Oxidative Phosphorylation
2/24	Chapter #20 Oxidative Phosphorylation
2/27	Relevance lecture TBA
3/1	Review and summary
3/3	Exam #2
3/6	Chapter #21 Photosynthesis electron transfer
3/8	Chapter #21 Photosynthesis electron transfer
3/10	Chapter #21 Photosynthesis – Calvin cycle
3/13	SPRING BREAK
3/15	SPRING BREAK
3/17	SPRING BREAK
3/20	Relevance Lecture: The structure and function of reaction centers (Fromme)
3/22	Chapter #22 Gluconeogenesis and Pentose Phosphate
3/24	Chapter #22 Gluconeogenesis and Pentose Phosphate
3/27	Chapter #23 Fatty Acid Catabolism
3/29	Chapter #24 Fatty Acid Biosynthesis
3/31	Relevance Lecture: Thinking about energy – what mankind can learn from Nature
4/3	Chapter #25 Nitrogen acquisition
4/5	Review and summary
4/7	Exam #3
4/10	Chapter #30 The Genetic Code
4/12	Chapter #30 Protein Synthesis
4/14	Chapter #30-31 Protein Synthesis
4/17	Chapter #31 Protein Folding, Modification, Degradation
4/19	Chapter #32 Topics in Signal Transduction
4/21	Relevance Lecture – The immune system
4/24	Relevance Lecture – Thinking about thinking
4/26	Relevance Lecture – Grand Challenge: accelerating evolution
4/28	Relevance Lecture – Continued
5/1	Review, final exam info and evaluations
5/8	Final Exam, LL 2, 12:20-2:10pm, Comprehensive