Understanding Biochemical Pathways: A Pattern-Recognition Approach provides students with a clear methodology for understanding metabolic processes, with an emphasis on human metabolic processes. It focuses on specific pathways of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism that illustrate how to apply this pattern-recognition approach.

This text presents a "basic recipe" of metabolism to illustrate the general sequence of reactions that are carried out in biochemical pathways to move from one oxidation state of carbon to another. The goal is to give the reader the ability to look at a reaction and determine the type of reaction based on the differences in reactants and products, identify the type of enzyme that would catalyze the reaction, and then name the enzyme based on enzyme naming rules.

The second edition features new Check Your Knowledge boxes and content summaries within each chapter. The text also features new content in Chapter 2 on the pawn shop model of metabolism to explain relationships between prominent metabolic pathways.

Understanding Biochemical Pathways is an excellent resource for courses and programs in biochemistry, nutrition, medicine, and nursing.