Introduction & Organic Functional Groups
Key Terms:
- Functional groups
- Logarithms
Essential Organic Nomenclature:
A considerable part of Biochemistry is the study of organic reactions in biological systems. Consequently it is necessary that you become familiar with some of the fundamentals of organic chemistry. However, since many (most?) of you are taking Organic Chemistry (09-117) concurrently, the topics in this course have been ordered so that the fundamentals will be learned first in OChem - especially with respect to covalent chemistry and mechanisms.
The essentials of what you need to know now can be found Table 1.1 of
Campbell and on a similar summary page,
Organic Nomenclature. A more comprehensive compilation can be found
at David Woodcock's Introduction
to Basic Organic Nomenclature at Okanagan University College.
Logarithms
Many of the equations seen in this course utilize logarithms. Some properties of logarithms are listed below:
Table of Some logarithms.
log10 100
2.0
ln 100
+4.6
log10 10
1.0
ln 10
+2.3
log10 5
0.7
ln 5
+1.61
log10 1
0.0
ln 1
0.00
log10 1/10
-1.0
ln 1/10
-2.3
Useful Numbers
- The most useful number in this course is RT, which is approximately:
- 2.5 kJ/mol at 300 K (27°C)
- 0.6 kcal/mol at 300 K
A more extensive listing of Constants and Conversion Factors is compiled on a separate page.
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