ABSTRACT
Many people have had the experience of looking through a microscope at a single cell. It may have been an ameba, alive and oozing about like a blob of jelly on the microscope slide, or a bacterial cell stained with a dye to make it show up more plainly. Or it may have been a beautiful algal cell with its bright green chlorophyll. Even the simplest of these cells is capable of carrying out a thousand or more chemical reactions. These life processes fall under the heading of biochemistry, that branch of chemistry dealing with the chemical properties, composition, and biologically mediated processes of complex substances in living systems.
