Chapter 8 Biochemistry then and now

Abstract

This chapter discusses the biochemistry accomplishments in 20 th century. For the pioneers, biochemistry was the study of the properties and metabolism of the components of living cells in physico-chemical terms. With the increasingly detailed study of the genome, its expressed proteins, and the regulation of its transcription, it is becoming possible to understand the behavior of the cell as a whole. One can also interpret how the cell responds to changes in its environment and how the consequential changes in the cytoplasm modulate and regulate events in the nucleus. Before 1940, biochemistry was primarily concerned with the identification of the components and properties of cytoplasm, with sugars and proteins as the major constituents of interest. Enzymes were the most obvious class of proteins and their general properties were intensively studied. Purification and analysis of proteins, particularly enzymes, were the most common biochemical procedures. The technical scene could hardly have changed more. While purification and structural determinations still feature in major areas of research, analyses of all sorts, often fully automated, are now performed on jig (or smaller) amounts of material. In many cases, the existence of hitherto unsuspected proteins is indicated by DNA sequencing.