ABSTRACT
This chapter is about biochemical reactions and how we can describe them quantitatively. Biochemical reactions are incredibly complex; many branching reaction pathways and “cycles” exist where a molecular species is transformed by multistep, enzyme-catalyzed reactions, and one of the end products turns out to be one of the starting molecules. In the following text, we provide the reader with some tools by reviewing some selected major biochemical pathways. These examples amply illustrate the complexity of biochemistry in action. First, however, we consider chemical reactions and chemical kinetics.
