Mother Nature is the best organic chemist of us all. She ought to be, she's been doing it in living things for at least three billion years.

Here's just a sample of her synthetic skill, taken from a sequence occuring in our bodies that we will look at in detail later:

Every step in this sequence is catalyzed. Every step is regulated, so that neither too much or too little of each substance is present in the organism. Each of us "knows" how to do this chemistry; we all have acquired Mother Nature's skill.

Questions immediately spring to mind:

• What are the catalysts?

• Where do they come from?

• How do they function?

• How is regulation accomplished?

• What is the utility of these syntheses?

• How do we "know" the chemistry?

and more.

The information to answer these questions is built into organisms in the form of chemical structures passed to each organism from its progenitors.

What we will try to do in this course is to answer some of those questions, including the key issue of how information is built into molecular structures. In fact, we might summarize the idea of the course simply, as "Structure is information."