Biochemical Pathways Wall Charts | Hacker News Reader

Biochemical Pathways Wall Charts

roche.com

109 pointspsychoslave28 comments

Oh these are great :) You can orientate yourself based on the big loop in the middle, which is the citric acid/krebs cycle - an important intermediate in cellular respiration to produce energy. The long pathway leading into the loop from the left of the poster is glycolysis, which produces a small amount of energy in the form of ATP and creates pyruvate which is then fed into the citrate cycle.

I can't figure out where the electron transport chain is however, but I suspect it is part of the stuff inside the citrate cycle loop.

If you want a clickable, but slower loading, version of this you could try KEGG: https://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map01100

Fun fact for the biochemically naive:

Krebs described both the TCA and the Urea cycle, which are sometimes (jokingly) referred to as the Krebs bi-cycle

way out of my element here, but i don’t think you’ll find the electron transport chain in these.

> I can't figure out where the electron transport chain is

It's at the lower half of Part 2; search for "oxidative phosphorylation".

Can fat be made into glucose? I can’t figure out if glycogen stores get replenished while fasting?

Has anyone spent the time to extract a single image from this? None of the gigapixel-website-extractors seem to work with it. Looks like a fairly simple curl+graphicsmagick shell script would do it. I'll post here if I get around to it myself.

I downloaded it from their website 2 months ago in pdf format and still have it. It's a file called Biochemical_Pathways.zip with these files in the archive:

    Biochemical Pathways Index.pdf
    Biochemical_Plan_1_neu_20180125_A0_print.pdf
    Biochemical_Plan_2_neu_20180125_A0_print.pdf
    Biochemical_Plan_production_information.pdf

If you google these you can find a pdf.

Edit: I've found the link in my browser history. Looks like it's still alive:

https://www.roche.com/dam/jcr:93f0c66d-6c05-411b-9e61-732cb0...

Thank you for the link!

Awesome! Just snatched it up as well. Thanks a lot. Beautiful on so many levels.

Biochemical Pathways provide an overview of the chemical reactions of cells in various species and organs. Dr. Michal first compiled the Pathways Chart in 1965 and has been fine-tuning it ever since. Today, and with the collaboration of Roche, the two enormous posters can be found hanging in just about every research institute from Argentina to New Zealand.

You'll find these posters hanging at just about every research lab in the world -- they're not so much a useful tool (e.g. like the giant periodic table in every chemistry classroom), but they're really impressive, and good advertising for Roche.

I spent a lot of time staring at these in grad school (usually while waiting for other things to happen).

How are they not a useful tool, though? I'd imagine that being able to glance at an overview diagram while you're learning and thinking about biochemical pathways is a boon. It seems as useful as any reference tool is. At least it helps me think about it.

Because they're usually hanging somewhere you can't use them (like on a freezer). Or they're just too complicated (overwhelming amount of noise), and without enough detail (lacking regulation aspects that are extremely important if you're actually doing anything with metabolism/omics).

If you need to know something about a pathway, opening a text book is easier and a much more complete source. The posters pretty much just artwork/an attempt to impress non-biochemists.

Definitely the latter, IMO. Posters like this don't have enough detail to matter if you're actually interested in the system. The volume of information is cool and fun to look at, but it's not really that useful, other than as a 10,000-foot reference. And the number of times you need a 10,000-foot reference is low enough that a big poster isn't really that helpful.

Giant periodic tables are actually a lot more useful, now that I think about it.

There is an icon under the zoom and scroll control on [0] which toggles overlays with boxes and labels on groups of pathways. It automatically activates when zooming out far enough.

[0] http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

Apparently they will send you hardcopies for the asking: https://www.roche.com/sustainability/philanthropy/science_ed...

Yep! Years ago while in school, I kindly asked Roche to send me the posters. These are great, both in terms of the form - as in room decoration, and in terms of function - great when studying biochem, etc.

There was one of these stuck onto at least one -80oC freezer in every lab I ever entered during my 20 years in biology.

It's incredible to consider how much time and money (funding) are backing these posters.

Book:

Biochemical Pathways: An Atlas of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology:

https://www.amazon.com/Biochemical-Pathways-Biochemistry-Mol...

I had my poster in my room while studying biochem topics. I still have the poster somewhere eventhough I left the R&D. It was fun to be amazed about that complexity but in reality when you for something you check it digitally/ online.

They still give these away free! I had one on my wall in college and memorized it by the end of my biochem class (I think at the time, early 90s, it was boeringer ingleheim).

Thoughts on the actual tools used to build such a complex chart with millimetric precision?

These are beautiful charts. I'm a complete noob to anything bio related. I wonder how many of these pathways are yet to be discovered?

Imagine doing something like this for computer science. What would even be on it? Algorithms, implementations, source code, object graphs?

A specific hardware architecture and all protocols associated with it. Maybe instruction sets as well.

NASA uses software blueprints analogous to CAD prior to coding:

https://history.nasa.gov/diagrams/diagrams.htm

Can anybody spot a printable version?

See the other posts in the thread -- just ask, and they'll send you one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com