Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Almost everybody finds classical thermodynamics difficult, and this has always been so: even the great physicists of the 19th century who created the subject had to struggle to understand it. It is not so much that the mathematics is so difficult: with a proper grounding in calculus, especially partial differentiation, one can understand the equations and their derivation easily enough in mathematical terms. On the other hand the qualitative ideas of statistical thermodynamics are not so difficult either. It is the effort relating these to the mathematics, and to classical thermodynamics (heat engines, Carnot cycles, etc.) that causes the eyes to glaze over.
Unfortunately, however, a training in thermodynamics is absolutely essential to chemistry and to the chemical underpinning of the biophysical analysis of cellular systems. Metabolism, for example, is not just a matter of listing all the chemical reactions; it is also a matter of knowing which ones will readily proceed and in what conditions. Determining all this involved a great deal of measurements in the 20th century on the equilibrium constants and other thermodynamic parameters of biochemical reactions. More than that, it involved understanding how the thermodynamic parameters of whole sequences of reactions depend on those of the individual processes, and how these depend on those of the component reactants.
Until now, however, textbooks that explain the principles of thermodynamics in the biochemical context have been few, a fewer still have been written in a way that students can be expected to understand. The new book of Daniel Beard and Hong Qian fills an important gap, therefore, and should be widely adopted in all departments where physical biochemistry is taught.
The first part of the book covers the basic concepts of thermodynamics, as far as possible using biologically relevant examples. Almost immediately the authors introduce the ideas that "in biology and chemistry we are usually not interested in the study of isolated systems", and that "biochemical processes occur in an aqueous environment". This brings us quite quickly to the idea that the Gibbs energy (not the entropy, and not the Helmholtz energy) is the quantity to consider in determining the thermodynamic driving force in a typical biochemical reaction. Likewise the stress is entirely on reactions in solutions, without the emphasis on gases (whether perfect or not) that tended to characterize textbooks in the past and to mystify raeders who wondered what perfect gases had to do with the sort of processes of primary concern in biology. This part of the book also deals with basic ideas of kinetics and transport.
In the second part the authors move on to the analysis and modelling of biochemical systems, the second part of which barely existed as a research topic twenty years ago but has in recent years become an essential component of systems biology. The relationship between enzyme mechanisms and reaction kinetics is explained briefly (as this is not a kinetics book) but thoroughly, and is followed by a chapter on control mechanisms and signalling, focussing on the properties such as zero-order ultrasensitivity and biochemical oscillations that are not possible for single enzymes but can emerge from interactions between several enzymes.
The last part of the book deals with several of what the authors call special topics, mainly ones that have been mentioned already but require a more profound and detailed treatment. A chapter, for example, is devoted to constraint-based analysis of biochemical systems -- the sort of modelling one can do when there is not enough information to set up an adequate kinetic model.
In summary (as I am quoted on the back cover as saying in my report to the publishers), this is one of the most useful and readable accounts of biochemical thermodynamics that I have seen for a long time, if indeed ever.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Chemical Biophysics: Quantitative Analysis of Cellular Systems (Cambridge Texts in Biomedical Engineering)
Chemical Biophysics provides an engineering-based approach to biochemical system analysis for graduate-level courses on systems biology, computational bioengineering and molecular biophysics. It is the first textbook to apply rigorous physical chemistry principles to mathematical and computational modeling of biochemical systems for an interdisciplinary audience. The book is structured to show the student the basic biophysical concepts before applying this theory to computational modeling and analysis, building up to advanced topics and research. Topics explored include the kinetics of nonequilibrium open biological systems, enzyme mediated reactions, metabolic networks, biological transport processes, large-scale biochemical networks and stochastic processes in biochemical systems. End-of-chapter exercises range from confidence-building calculations to computational simulation projects.
