Physics in Biochemistry?

Question

Hi guys. I was given a practice interview last week in preparation for university interviews, and one of the questions my interviewer asked me was, "can you tell me what aspects of biochemistry in which physics plays an important role?" How would you answer it? I said something very vague about how in certain biochemical techniques you'd have to understand the physics behind it?!

Answer 1

Tricky question for a university interview.

Physics underlies *all* science, see this for a comic explanation:

http://www.xkcd.com/435/

So, understanding how atoms and molecules interact might help with (for example) modelling how an enzyme binds its substrate, or how iron ions interact with the porphyrin ring of haemoglobin.

Understanding how electromagnetic radiation and matter interact will help you understand how certain spcetrophotometers work (like fluorimeters, circular dichroism spectropolarimeters, etc.), or understand how X-ray crystallography can give molecular structures.

Understanding how magentic fields and matter interact helps with understanding how NMR can provide the structure of molecules.

And so on...

I think I'd have gone with X-ray crystallography and the structure of DNA myself.