Biochemistry for Science & Health Careers

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Coursera Specialization
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Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

8 weeks, 10 hours a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Intermediate

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Whether you're headed to medical, dental, veterinary, or pharmacy school, a bioengineering or biomedical science program, or a career in clinical laboratory science or biomedical research, a strong foundation in biochemistry is essential – and that's exactly what this program builds. Biochemistry explains the chemical logic behind how the human body works, and this program covers it in depth, independent of which of those paths you're on. Across 10 courses, you'll work from foundational concepts – amino acids, protein structure, membranes, enzymes, and enzyme kinetics – into the metabolic pathways that keep the body running: carbohydrate, lipid, amino acid, and nucleotide metabolism. You'll trace the central dogma through DNA replication, repair, transcription, and translation, then see how hormones, signal transduction, and metabolic control coordinate all of it. A dedicated course on vitamins covers essential micronutrients and their deficiency diseases. Each course is organized around clear learning objectives and includes knowledge-check quizzes throughout, so you can confirm understanding before moving to the next topic. To be successful in this program, you should have a background in general biology and general chemistry.

Syllabus

Course 1: Biochemistry: Foundations
Course 2: Enzymes and Enzyme Kinetics
Course 3: Carbohydrate Metabolism
Course 4: Lipid Metabolism
Course 5: Amino Acid Metabolism
Course 6: Purine and Pyrimidine Metabolism
Course 7: RNA, DNA and the Genetic Code
Course 8: Vitamins
Course 9: Hormones and Signal Transduction
Course 10: Metabolic Control

Courses

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Amino acid metabolism covers how the body builds, breaks down, and recycles the building blocks of protein, along with the nitrogen they carry. This course works through the synthesis of each amino acid family – serine, cysteine, aspartate and asparagine, the methionine-threonine-lysine group, the branched-chain amino acids, and the aromatic amino acids including tryptophan and phenylalanine – and the diseases that result when specific enzymes in these pathways are deficient. You'll then cover amino acid catabolism, the central role of glutamate, and the urea cycle, including how nitrogen is safely excreted and what happens when urea cycle enzymes are deficient. The course closes with heme metabolism and iron homeostasis, and bilirubin metabolism, including the enterohepatic circulation that explains jaundice and its causes.
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Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes that keep cells and organisms running, and this course builds the foundation for everything else in the program. You'll start with amino acids and work up through the four levels of protein structure – primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary – including how peptide bonds form and how proteins fold, move, signal, and perform their many roles in the body. From there, you'll examine biological membranes: their structure, the lipid bilayer, and the transport proteins and ion channels that control what crosses them. The course then introduces the central dogma of molecular biology – nucleotide structure, DNA replication, transcription, mRNA processing, tRNA charging, and translation – before closing with the core principles of metabolism, including catabolism versus anabolism, metabolic pathways, Gibbs free energy, oxidation-reduction reactions, and how cells regulate enzymatic activity through allosterism and covalent modification.
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Carbohydrate metabolism is the set of pathways that break down and build glucose to fuel the body's cells, and this course walks through each one in turn. You'll cover glycolysis and the fate of pyruvate, gluconeogenesis and how it reciprocally regulates with glycolysis, and the citric acid cycle, glyoxylate cycle, and ketone body metabolism that follow. The course also covers the pentose phosphate pathway and its role in generating NADPH, and glycogen metabolism – how glycogen is synthesized, broken down, and regulated by hormones such as insulin and epinephrine through signal transduction and second messengers like cyclic AMP. Along the way, you'll examine the metabolism of fructose and galactose and the enzymes and disorders associated with each. By the end, you'll be able to explain how these pathways interconnect to keep blood glucose levels within a normal range.
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Enzymes are the catalysts that make the chemical reactions of life happen fast enough to sustain it, and this course explains how they work and how their activity is measured and controlled. You'll start with the basics of catalysis, the induced-fit model, and the stepwise mechanism of serine proteases. The course covers allosteric enzymes and the classification of enzymes into their six traditional functional classes, then examines how enzymes are inhibited – competitively, non-competitively, uncompetitively, and irreversibly through suicide inhibition – and how each inhibition type changes an enzyme's kinetic plots. These concepts recur throughout the rest of the program, since drug mechanisms and metabolic regulation are both, at their core, questions of enzyme kinetics.
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Hormones let distant cells communicate, and signal transduction is how a target cell converts that message into an internal response. This course introduces the major classes of hormones and how they interact with the cell membrane, then works through G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling in detail: G-protein structure, the second messenger cAMP, protein kinase A, and how beta-adrenergic receptor signaling is switched off. You'll then cover receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) signaling, including the insulin receptor and GLUT-4, and the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathway, before turning to nuclear hormone receptors and steroid hormone signaling, and non-hormone signaling in nerve transmission. The course closes with signal transduction in disease, covering oncogenes, RAS and SRC mutations, HER2 and the Philadelphia chromosome, and how tyrosine kinase inhibitors are used to treat the cancers these pathways cause.
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Lipid metabolism governs how the body stores, breaks down, and builds fats, membrane lipids, and hormone precursors, and this course covers each of those processes. You'll examine fat breakdown and synthesis, the beta oxidation of fatty acids and the energy it yields, the oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids, and how new fatty acids – including those longer than 16 carbons – are synthesized. The course then turns to membrane lipids, covering the synthesis of glycerophospholipids and sphingolipids, before closing with steroid and bile acid metabolism: the mevalonate pathway, receptor-mediated endocytosis of LDL cholesterol, the classes of steroid hormones, and the structure and function of bile acids. Throughout, the course connects these pathways to clinically relevant outcomes, from energy metabolism to cholesterol handling.
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Metabolic control examines how hormones and enzyme regulation keep the body's fuel-burning pathways working together instead of against each other. This course covers how insulin and epinephrine signal through protein kinase A and phosphoprotein phosphatase to control fat metabolism, and how reciprocal regulation – driven by molecules such as fructose-2,6-bisphosphate, AMP, ATP, and citrate – prevents glycolysis and gluconeogenesis from running at the same time and wasting energy in a futile cycle. You'll also cover the Cori cycle and the specific role the liver plays in maintaining blood glucose levels for the rest of the body during fasting and exercise. This course draws together concepts from the carbohydrate metabolism, lipid metabolism, and hormone signaling courses to show how metabolism is coordinated at the whole-body level, which is exactly the kind of integrative reasoning that pre-health coursework and exams expect.
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Purine and pyrimidine metabolism explains how cells build and break down the nucleotide building blocks of DNA and RNA. This course covers de novo purine synthesis and its regulation, and de novo pyrimidine synthesis, including the ATCase reaction and the synthesis of UTP and CTP. You'll examine purine and pyrimidine catabolism and salvage pathways, including how excess uric acid leads to gout and how drugs such as allopurinol intervene. The course then covers deoxyribonucleotide synthesis via ribonucleotide reductase and thymidine synthesis via thymidylate synthase, including the folate-recycling reactions these enzymes depend on, before closing with a look at nucleoside analog drugs used in chemotherapy and antiviral treatment. These pathways connect directly to the drug mechanisms covered elsewhere in the program.
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This course looks closely at how genetic information is copied, corrected, and read out inside the cell. You'll cover DNA replication in depth: the roles of DNA polymerase and other replication proteins, the replication fork, the difference between the leading and lagging strands, Okazaki fragments, and the role of telomeres and telomerase in protecting chromosome ends. The course then covers the major DNA repair systems and the consequences when they fail, before turning to RNA and gene expression – the complexity of eukaryotic RNA structure, the role of chromatin and histones in eukaryotic gene expression, and an introduction to epigenetics. From there, you'll cover RNA splicing and the spliceosome, catalytic RNAs and ribozymes, and RNA interference, including how microRNA and silencing RNA regulate gene expression. Together, these topics build directly on the central dogma introduced in Biochemistry: Foundations and go a level deeper into the molecular mechanisms involved.
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Vitamins are essential micronutrients that the body cannot make in sufficient quantity on its own, and each has its own biochemical roles and deficiency diseases. This course covers vitamin A and its role in vision and retinoic acid signaling, vitamin D's role in calcium homeostasis – including how parathyroid hormone and calcitonin regulate calcium and phosphate levels and how vitamin D acts inside the cell – and vitamin B12 and folate metabolism, including how folate metabolism connects to the nucleotide synthesis pathways covered in Purine and Pyrimidine Metabolism. Throughout, the course ties each vitamin's biochemistry to the clinical conditions that arise from deficiency or dysregulation, giving you a working knowledge of vitamins that applies directly to nutrition and clinical coursework.