BCH2011: Structure and Function of Cellular Biomolecules

- Practical sessions (30%; hurdle)
These practical sessions were not all wet practicals; some were tutorials in which you practiced calculations (e.g., calculating amounts and concentrations of substances, developing experimental protocols), and others were self-directed learning exercises (e.g., going through a computer exercise in which you try to isolate an enzyme from a mixture using a variety of experimental techniques). Practical sessions 3 and 5 required you to construct and present a PowerPoint presentation on one of four pre-allocated proteins (e.g., RAS, immunoglobulin G). This presentation was completed in groups of 3 or 4 and involved peer assessment as well as assessment by your tutor. Each wet practical had a series of questions to be answered afterwards. Often, this would involve constructing one or more graphs, performing some calculations and explaining your results and any errors in your results. You had one week from the beginning of a practical session to write the report and submit it online via Moodle. Detailed criteria sheets were given for each practical session, both in the practical manual and on Moodle.

- Mid-semester test (10%; not a hurdle)
This test was conducted in Week 7 during one of our normal lecture times. It went for 45 minutes and comprised short-answer questions covering all content covered so far (i.e., proteins, with the exclusion of enzymes, which were covered in Week 8 ). The average mark on the MST for 2016 was 58.8 out of 100.

- End-of-semester exam (60%; hurdle)
You had 3 hours to complete the exam, although most of us finished a bit early. Like the MST, the exam was also all short-answer. 30% of the exam covered proteins, another 30% was dedicated specially to enzymes, and the remaining 40% was for carbohydrates, lipids and biological membranes.

Content:
I found the content on proteins and enzymes to be enjoyable, especially the content on titration curves of amino acids, techniques for analysing proteins, and enzyme kinetics. The practicals were all focused on proteins and enzymes, with no practicals being dedicated to Mibel's content. Some of the things we did in the wet practicals included making an experimental protocol and using a spectrophotometer to construct a calibration curve in order to determine unknown concentrations; separating two proteins using gel filtration chromatography and SDS page; measuring the rate of a hydrolysis reaction in the presence of an acid versus in the presence of an enzyme. We frequently used pipettes and water baths and also used a centrifuge in one session. I liked the fact that the practical sessions were varied - we had wet practicals, discussion tutorials, an oral presentation, and self-directed learning exercises one of which was a computer-based exercise.

As for Mibel's content, I enjoyed this less. Why? It went into way less detail than did Martin's content. All you were really expected to know and do on the exam for Mibel's content was to identify things (e.g., identify different features of a phospholipid such as its glycerol backbone, name an example of a mechanism of active transport, label a diagram of the extracellular matrix), whereas Martin's content had you drawing and interpreting graphs and experimental data, and considering mathematical relationships, and learning about biological processes such as mRNA translation.

Lecturers:
Martin was brilliant. He knew his stuff and, more importantly, he knew how to communicate his stuff effectively. He included lots of practice questions on the lecture slides, which we almost always went over during the lectures and which were extremely beneficial for understanding the content and performing well on the assessments. He was engaging and his lectures never ever felt rushed.

I felt like Mibel knew her stuff less well, or perhaps I only felt this way because of the fact that her content was really only a surface-level analysis of what can be some really interesting topics.

Assessments:
This unit is quite a large amount of work - 3 hours of lectures + 3 hours of practical work + time for writing up the practical reports, preparing your oral presentation, studying for the MST, studying for the end-of-year exam which is weighted very heavily, etc. What was discouraging is the fact that you have to do so much work throughout the semester, and yet this work is only worth 40% of your whole grade; in fact, this unit had the most in-semester work out of all of the units I've done, and yet the weighting for in-semester work in this unit was the least out of all the units I've done.
To be fair, it's not particularly hard to pass all the assessments - at least it wasn't for me. If you take the time to keep up to date with the lectures, if you make sure you go over the practice questions provided on the lecture slides, if you prepare for your practicals by reading the practical manual and if you make sure you've covered all the points on the criteria sheets, you'll be fine.

Martin Stone (for proteins and enzymes) and Mibel Aguilar (for carbohydrates, lipids and biological membranes)

The 2014 and 2015 MSTs were made available to us on the Moodle page. I'd highly recommend doing any and all MSTs provided, as they are all similar in content and question style.

As for the end-of-semester exam, there was a bit of a situation: the previous year's exam was available on the Monash library website, but apparently it wasn't supposed to be. The exam was taken off of the site once the staff realised, but many of us (myself included) had already looked at and/or completed this exam as practice. This year's exam ended up being VERY similar to last year's exam, with some questions even being exactly the same. I suspect next year's students won't be afforded the same benefit. Other questions on this year's exam were similar to our MST, or to previous MSTs. But, if you wanted to predict what would be on the exam, all you really had to do was go through the lecture slides provided and look at the example questions. The lecture slides were littered with example questions which were gone over either during the lectures or during our revision lecture at the end of semester and covered concepts which were assessed on the exam. That and Martin Stone (one of the lecturers) quite often hinted at what he liked to examine on the MST and end-of-year exam. Furthermore, a whole heap of questions organised into different topics were available through Moodle. Other past exams from the early 00s and from the 90s are also available on the Monash library website but it wouldn't recommend doing them as they have a completely different format from the current exam format (essay-style questions, as opposed to short-answer questions). No information or skills were taken from the practical sessions for the exam.

4/5

Yes, with screen capture.

The prescribed textbook was Lehninger's 'Principles of Biochemisty' by Nelson and Cox (6ed for me). Would I recommend this textbook? Personally, I didn't use the textbook. It's not very reader-friendly imo and it's big and heavy and it's expensive and I got along just fine by attending/watching the lectures and working off of the lecture slides provided. That being said, I'm only one person and others may have found the textbook to be useful - perhaps as an alternative source of information if the lecture content/slides proved confusing or insufficient. Also, this textbook is also prescribed for BCH2022 (the continuation of BCH2011 in Semester 2), and perhaps it'll be more needed for that subject.

There was another, recommended-only book, but I didn't purchase it and can't recall what it was. I believe it might have been a guide to writing up practical reports for Biochemistry, or about lab skills for Biochemistry. Idk, but I didn't use it.

- 3 1-hour lectures per week, with a break from lectures in Week 7
- 10 practical sessions of a maximum of 3 hours in duration + write-up time

S1, 2016

HD (95)