DIY Glycolysis

Back to Introduction, forward to The Task Ahead.

Strategy

You will need to use some imagination to get something out of this exercise. If you memorise the sequence of reactions from the text book and simply enter them, you will learn very little. In fact you will find that you will sometimes learn more from choosing the wrong reactions! Each time you choose the wrong reaction type, a page of text will tell you whether the reaction is impossible, undesirable or simply not the way it has evolved. More important, it will tell you why. Hopefully you will discover that glycolysis is not simply a series of chemicals which you must memorise but a finely optimised system for squeezing energy out of glucose which has evolved over billions of years.

The key to learning is to try things out and see what happens. The application will not let you make two wrong choices in a row - you always get an explanation and then you can backtrack. In fact you can can backtrack at any time using the appropriate command in your Web Browser.

What if you want to come back to these introductory pages without loosing your place in the pathway? Click on the home page icon to jump directly to the home page, read the pages you are interested in and then use the go back feature of your Web Browser to backtrack to where you started.