ABSTRACT
A large conceptual difference that exists between the way biochemists think and the way organic chemists think has to do with solvents and buffers. The organic chemist will need his reactions to be in an environment of a certain polarity, either a protic environment or an aprotic one, with extreme purity, and at temperatures that range from freezing cold up to hundreds of degrees. So far from avoiding contaminating chemicals, the biochemist will deliberately seek them out in order to control the pH of nucleic acids watery environment. These contaminants, from the organic chemist’s point of view, are the buffers the biochemist uses. A buffer is a chemical system that resists changing pH from a certain value. The buffer environment is very important to the biochemist because it determines the charge state of the biomolecules. In general, the concentration of protein molecules or nucleic acid molecules will be much less than the concentration of any buffering component.
