Transcription
So fats or lipids. Lipids is a fancy word for fats. This is another of the main classes or types of biological macromolecules. Remember macromolecules are large molecules. So in biology we have some main types of molecules: carbohydrates, proteins, um lipids or fats, and then we also have nucleic acids which is DNA and RNA that we'll get to later on in the semester.
But lipids are one of these four main types of molecules that are important in biology. However, they are a little different to the other three types, the carbs and the proteins and the nucleic acids, because this type of molecule, lipids or fats, they don't follow the pattern of monomers linking up together to make polymers. So all those other types, just like we learned with the carbs, you get a single molecule or a simple small molecule and then you link it together multiple times in a long chain to make a bigger molecule, and you see this pattern happening over and over again and the molecules in the family. All the carbs kind of follow that same pattern.
Lipids are don't follow that pattern. Basically what lipids are are kind of a catchy group of any molecule that is hydrophobic. So hydrophobic means they do not like water, and we're kind of used to the idea of fats and oils not mixing with water. So it's something that we're used to. And so the only thing that really links lipids together and means that they get classified as this kind of molecule is that they're hydrophobic.
There's names of three different types of lipids on here um that we're going to be learning about. Uh we have um triglycerides, let me get my pen work in here, triglycerides, steroids, and phospholipids. These are all kinds of lipids, but if you were to look at them, you wouldn't really recognize a pattern. Like steroids don't look like triglycerides. Star wars don't look like phospholipids. So there's not a pattern here. The only reason these are all lumped together into a group that we call lipids is that they are hydrophobic and they're large. Um but those are the three that we're going to learn and I'll put up three videos and we'll go over each one in turn.