CHEMICAL BALANCING EQUATION BASIC INFORMATION AND TUTORIALS

Basic chemical equation balancing.

If you carry out a chemical reaction and carefully sum up the masses of all the reactants, and then you compare the sum to the sum of the masses of all the products, you see that they’re the same.

In fact, a law in chemistry, the law of conservation of mass, states, “In an ordinary chemical reaction, matter is neither created nor destroyed.” This means that you neither gain nor lose any atoms during the reaction.

They may be combined differently, but they’re still there.

A chemical equation represents the reaction, and that chemical equation needs to obey the law of conservation of mass. You use that chemical equation to calculate how much of each element you need and how much of each element will be produced.

You need to have the same number of each kind of element on both sides of the equation. The equation should balance.

Before you start balancing an equation, you need to know the reactants and the products for that reaction. You can’t change the compounds, and you can’t change the subscripts, because that would change the compounds.

So the only thing you can do to balance the equation is put in coefficients, whole numbers in front of the compounds or elements in the equation.

Coefficients tell you how many atoms or molecules you have. For example, if you write 2 H2O, it means you have two water molecules:
2 H2O = H2O + H2O

Each water molecule is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. So with 2 H2O, you have a total of four hydrogen atoms and two oxygen atoms. In this section, I show you how to balance equations using a method called balancing by inspection (or as I call it, “fiddling with coefficients”).

You take each atom in turn and balance it by inserting appropriate coefficients on one side or the other. You can balance most simple reactions in this fashion, but one class of reactions is so complex that this method doesn’t work well for them: redox reactions.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RECEPTORS AND ENZYMES

What is the difference and similarities between receptors and enzymes?

Like enzymes, receptors are common targets in drug discovery. Receptors act as switches that can be turned on or off. When turned on, receptors initiate a cascade of events that ultimately produce a biological response.

The body contains thousands of different receptors. Despite their diversity, almost all receptors can be classified into a handful of different receptor superfamilies.

Receptors bind molecules that either activate or suppress the normal function of the receptor. The impact of receptor binding can be modeled mathematically to allow better understanding of receptor function. Better understanding of receptor function ultimately allows for the design of safer, more effective drugs.

Both enzymes and receptors are proteins, and therefore both biological structures share many fundamental similarities. Regardless their roles within a biological system are distinct from one another.

Similarities
As proteins, both enzymes and receptors possess the same aspects of primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure. Just as with enzymes, proper folding of a receptor depends on environmental factors, including temperature and pH. The shape of a receptor is crucial because, like enzymes, receptors operate by binding other molecules, called ligands.

The similarities between enzymes and receptors allow both systems to be modeled with many of the same mathematical equations. Most treatments of receptors and enzymes appear to be very different, but the derivations and theories can largely be recycled between the two.

Difference
The primary difference between receptors and enzymes lies in what they do. Enzymes convert a substrate to a product. Receptors do not catalyze a reaction or otherwise convert a ligand. Instead, receptors bind a ligand, or primary messenger.

Upon binding a ligand, a receptor changes its conformation to initiate a series of events. These events may involve a number of other agents, including enzymes (effectors), binding proteins (transducers), and/or other signaling molecules (secondary messengers).

The number of other players in the pathway depends on the particular receptor. Each ligand can potentially produce many secondary messengers, a phenomenon known as signal amplification. Ultimately, the entire process generates an observable biological response.