Biological Macromolecules

A wooden board holding wedges of several cheeses, a red bell pepper, a small dish of dark preserve, green grapes, and pears, with a basket of bread rolls behind. — Foods such as bread, fruit, and cheese are rich sources of biological macromolecules. (credit: modification of work by Bengt Nyman)

Food provides the body with the nutrients it needs to survive. Many of these critical nutrients are biological macromolecules, or large molecules, necessary for life. Different smaller organic molecule (monomer) combinations build these macromolecules (polymers). What specific biological macromolecules do living things require? How do these molecules form? What functions do they serve? We explore these questions in this chapter.

Sections

Synthesis of Biological Macromolecules — how dehydration synthesis joins monomers into polymers and hydrolysis breaks them apart again.
Carbohydrates — monosaccharides, disaccharides, and polysaccharides: their structures, the glycosidic bonds that link them, and their roles in energy storage and structure.
Lipids — fats and oils, saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, trans fats and omega fats, phospholipids and the membrane bilayer, waxes, and steroids such as cholesterol.
Proteins — amino acids and the peptide bond, the four levels of protein structure, what proteins do, and how denaturation and chaperones affect folding.
Nucleic Acids — nucleotides, the antiparallel double helix of DNA, and the structure and roles of the four types of RNA.

This chapter is adapted from Biology 2e, Chapter 3: Biological Macromolecules by Mary Ann Clark, Jung Choi, Matthew Douglas, and OpenStax, © OpenStax, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Access the original for free at openstax.org. Each section page records its own changes from the source. Changes: the chapter-opening photograph is the source’s, re-encoded for the web with its credit kept in the caption and its alt text expanded to name what is on the tray.

Carbon Synthesis of Biological Macromolecules