Metabolism - a glimpse of it

Hello folks,
Life's been a bit busy lately, so yesterday I finally got a chance to
sit down and catch up on ASDLC a bit. One thing that struck me is the
abundance of "Nutrient/Factor X is the key!" "No, nutrient/factor Y
is!" sort of arguments vis-a-vis metabolism.

One benefit to being pre-med is that my education so far allows me to
recognize I don't know even 1% of the metabolic pathways and how they
work. Metabolism is a vast network of checks and balances. Although
there are some basic principles that can be understood, the overall
process is simply too overwhelming for even a very highly educated and
intelligent person to fully assimilate - never mind us.

In order to give those who want it some small sense of how complex the
metabolic networks in the human body are - and how inextricably
they're intertwined - I've found a link that may help. In many
college biology classrooms there is a huge chart that is covered with
tiny little arrows and text that represents human metabolic processes.
This is a highly simplified version of the same thing. If you click
on any of the text labels you'll be taken to yet another complex chart
that represents the system you click on.

I hope this helps.

http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/get_pathway?org_name=mim&mapno=01100

Take care,
Carmen