Task 1

Self-Reflection: Introduction to Biochemistry

It is nice to meet you Meowies! Today, on the 28^th of January, my first class of the week has begin. Surprisingly, our class consist of only 9 students which is good because I can concentrate better. This group of student in my class is great. They remembered a lot from other subject lesson and apply it in this subject. All of them is actively involved and demonstrated eagerness to learn.

In every subject that we are taking it is important for all the lecturers to explain about our course learning outcome. It is known as CLO. By understanding this, it will help us to focus on applying and integrating the knowledge and skills acquired for this course. There are 3 important CLO that we need to keep it to the back of our mind:

            Before we begin our lecture today, Dr. Hashimatul ask us a question, “What is the importance of biochemistry in our daily?” or “What is the first thing that came out from our mind about biochemistry?”. Therefore, we spent the first 10 minutes discussing among each other.

            Based on our discussion, we can create, develop and improve the cure to prevent disease in medicine. Recently there is an outbreak of wuhan virus which is now identified as coronavirus is originated from China. We were told that we can find a cure for this virus by learning biochemistry which makes it quite interesting to study in this course. Apart from that, it is used in clinical diagnosis which is manufacturing various biological products and treatment of diseases. Biochemistry also plays an important role in metabolism and cellular activities such as dealing wirh body substance like enzymes, hormones, DNA and etc. This shows that life depends on biochemical reactions and processes.

            There are a lot of biochemistry that occur in our everyday life. For example, we used biochemistry to begin our day. In the morning, we brush our teeth with toothpaste which its superior ability is to kill microbes. It’s also used in perfumes and cosmetics beautiful smelled. We shouldn’t rinse our mouth with water to ensures that the fluoride found in the majority of toothpastes will remain on the teeth and continue to be effective. Fluoride is the single-most important ingredient in toothpaste. It greatly helps oral health by strengthening the tooth enamel, making it more resistant to tooth decay. It also reduces the amount of acid that the bacteria on your teeth produce. Apart from that is cooking where heat, with or without water, is used to denature and break down biological materials to detoxify or to make nutrients more easily available. When turning the stove on, the gas produce methane. If you make your own bread, then you are using fermentation which involves biochemical processes. Furthermore, when you start your car, the car is now running on gasoline, which is a mixture of oil and derivatives of organic compounds, including a small percentage of octane, which improves the quality of the fuel. Therefore, we see how all the organic compounds used in our daily lives. If we look around the house or workplace just once, we will find a lot of these vehicles that we use in our daily lives when reading the labels of medicines, pesticides and also inks. There are also a variety of things such as plastics, paints and dyes. The modern world and modern society cannot live without organic compounds.

            During the lectures, Dr. Hashimatul introduce us the introduction of Biochemistry. It helped me to recollect a lot of important information from the class. I have learned that there 3 areas of biochemistry which is conformational, metabolism and informational. In an atom of most cells or organism are mostly consist of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. There are six nonmetallic elements in the backbone molecules such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur (CHNOPS). This is because they are capable of forming strong covalent bond.

I also learned that there are two type of biomolecule which is micromolecules and macromolecules. Micromolecules can also polymerize and becomes macromolecules. The examples of biomolecules are shown in table 1.

Micromolecules	Macromolecules
Nucleotides	Nucleic acid
Amino acid	Protein
Carbohydrate/Saccharides	Polysaccharides
Lipids	Triacylglycerides (TAG)

Overall, the class went well and I enjoy learning this subject because there is a lot of interaction between the lecturer and the student or the student with each other. This is just the beginning, I’m interested to explore and to learn more about biochemistry. I hope in the next class we will have a lot of discussion, activities and exercise which can improve our communications and understanding.