<p>Does taking Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry help Biomedical Engineering majors? Is it useful or just plain unnecessary? (and no, I don't plan on Med school).</p>
<p>I thought those were required classes for that major anyways; or is that just Chemical Engineering?</p>
<p>Depends on what you’re interested in. We were required to take both and I ended up loving biochem. At least one class of o-chem is a really good idea if you want to do biochem. But there are certainly fields of BME that wouldn’t benefit too much from these classes.</p>
<p>I think every BME would benefit from at least one semester of orgo. If you want to get into the field of biopharmaceutical engineering it is required to take both semesters. I don’t think biochem is required but I would imagine that it would be helpful. I doubt it would be necessary for fields like biomechanics or biophotonics.</p>
<p>At my school, only students that want to go to medical school take Biochemistry and Organic Chemistry.</p>
<p>We have Applied Chem for BME that’s sort of like a washed down Organic Chem (so I’ve heard) and I think we might also have a washed down Biochemistry course too. Is it better to take the real thing? </p>
<p>What about Physical Chemistry? Esp. for nanotechnology?</p>
<p>Kidnovelist, what school do you attend? Son is interested in BME, but not med school. Wants to possibly work with prosthetics, but the whole field is new to him, so who knows where his interest will take him?</p>
<p>Montegut, I go to The City College of New York. It has a good engineering program for an affordable price. The BME faculty is wonderful. Check it out if you want. </p>
<p>[Department</a> of Biomedical Engineering - CCNY - CUNY](<a href=“http://bme.ccny.cuny.edu/]Department”>http://bme.ccny.cuny.edu/)</p>
<p>KidNovelist, take Orgo! it is the most useful class ever! Transport and stuff are just a whole lot of theoretical crap that you will never use in your life. Microfabrication is an okay course, but Ms. MIT doesn’t know how to teach it.</p>
<p>I’m in BME. I look a washed down course in orgo. All mechanisms, nomenclature and conceptional material. I still have to take biochemistry. I recommend that you do take a course in both. I don’t know if your school has a condense course for orgo but take it. You will not need everything in organic like NMR but some things are important to know. I’ll give you an example later. Also I recommend you take a lab so that you know some of the lab techniques should you use them. For a biochem course, a condesnes version is ok but it seems like a lot of fun so I’m trying to decided if I want to take biochem 511 or the series for major students. For pchem it’s useless. I helped my friend with her pchem homework and a lot of the stuff you learn in other classes or a transport class. </p>
<p>For one of my homeworks we were given a picture of PLGA that had been attacked by water. We had to comment one it’s semicrystalline structure and what happen. You form an alcohol and and ester so you want to know about what is forming. Here was my response to the question below.</p>
<p>Poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) is formed from derivatives of ploy (lactic acid) with a co polymer. PLGA is more commonly known as a polyester which comes from the class of degradable polymers used in biomaterials. Most polyesters are used for drug delivery, tissue engineering scaffolding and sutures. Sutures, commonly known as stitches are made of PLGA that biodegrades in the body after a period of time. They are useful when tissues need to be held into place for a small amount of time until healing has occurred and then sutures begin to degrade and integrate with epithelial tissue and the surrounding cellular matrix.
When looking at the internal structure of resorbable sutures we see they are made of PLGA which is in a semi-crystalline structure. This semi-crystalline comes from the manufacturing of the polymers and its properties. Polymers are made of weak bonds that are broken up by low temperature changes and they have a low coefficient of thermal expansion. Because of this at high temperatures or their melting temperature they are viscous liquids but then are cooled at a constant wt% then form a crystalline region and amorphous reason when looking at the microstructure. It is important to note up heating and recooling it will take a different structure because it is energetically unfavorable to place all the bonds back to their original pattern. They become semi crystalline upon reaching the glassy transition temperature. At this point the polymer has an amorphous region which gives it the semi crystalline behavior.
For the structure below we see that the polymer has began to experience biodegradation. This reaction is because the PLGA is in an environment where most polymers begin to break down. This reaction is most likely due to the following environmental factors: pH of where the suture is implanted, wither organic solvents are located around the region of application and hydrolysis of the polymer. More specifically for this structure of PLGA is experiencing a biochemical and chemical mechanism for polymer degradation. In terms of the chemical degradation the PLGA is experiencing hydrolysis at the ethyl groups of the PLGA monomer which splits the ester bond into an alcohol and acid. By this hydrolysis occurring, the molecular weight of the chain is changing along with it the tensile strength of PLGA. This is directly a result of water coming in contact with PLGA. In the next step the amorphous region of the polymer experiences hydrolytic cleavage attack which causes the bonds in the amorphous region to change their configuration, lengthen and expand as shown in the picture. In terms of the biochemical mechanism enzymic activity occurs due to the enzymes that follow an esterase function changing the configuration of the ester bonds without changing its configuration. In this case these would be considered enzyme catalysis that induce degradation along with a water pH of 7.4.
In terms of the suture semi-crystalline structure the reason we get this structure as stated above is because water lengthens the amorphous regions of the PLGA. Because of these we can clearly see the strings that result because of this hydrolosis but taking note the solid part of the PLGA remains also. This is because of its crystalline property. Because the PLGA has solid structure when made it can resist the hydrolytic attack by water and retain its shape. The crystalline part of PLGA must be broken down by some other way. This can also be thought of in terms of the molecular level. Even though the ester bonds changes, the same internal structure remains in the polymer.</p>