Biochemical Reactions

Cells can do lots of wonderful things. Individually they can move, contract, excrete, reproduce, signal or respond to signals, and carry out the energy transactions necessary for this activity. Collectively they perform all of the numerous functions of any living organism necessary to sustain life. Yet, remarkably, all of what cells do can be described in terms of a few basic natural laws. The fascination with cells is that although the rules of behavior are relatively simple, they are applied to an enormously complex network of interacting chemicals and substrates. The effort of many lifetimes has been consumed in unraveling just a few of these reaction schemes, and there are many more mysteries yet to be uncovered.