Don't Know Much about Bi-ol-o-gy

Proteins are the rock stars of the cellular macromolecules. They are also the policemen, carpenters, truck drivers, trucks, and heavy construction materials, not to mention the chemists, engineers, and heavy and light machinery. These protean characters are all assembled from the same seemingly boring pattern though - long one-dimensional chains composed of just twenty types of subunits - one damn thing after another.

I have, you might just guess, reached the end of the Protein chapter of Bray, Alberts, et als Essential Cell Biology, and I've become quite fond of it. It's a really nice piece of pedagogy. I've probably already mentioned that it has approximately one million words and a similar number of pictures - all excellently executed and instructive. Another nice touch is the problems, some of which are distributed in the text and others concentrated at the ends of chapters. I find them moderately challenging - I mean I miss a lot of the answers - and highly instructive. they nearly always have highly relevant pedagogical points.

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