About
An interactive textbook that refuses to make things up.
Biochemistrypedia is an interactive site for learning biochemistry, built for the students working through an introductory biochemistry course. It is free, and nobody paid for it. The content comes from material Prof. Deppmann already has: twenty years of lectures and the book The Molecule Hunters.
The rules that keep it honest
- No invented molecules. Every 3D structure is loaded live by accession ID from RCSB PDB (macromolecules) or PubChem (small molecules). Nothing is drawn by an AI, ever.
- No unreviewed figures. Every lecture slide names the person who checked it for accuracy and copyright, and a slide without a reviewer fails the build — the site literally won't compile. Many slides use AI-assisted illustration; the slide viewer says so, and a slide with a known drawing error carries a note saying what is wrong. The scientist portraits are AI-generated artwork and are labeled that way.
- No borrowed questions. Every practice and MCAT-style question is written for this site and comes with its answer and an explanation of why. MCAT-style items are original, not real AAMC questions.
- Honest media. Videos and podcasts are embedded from their source, never rehosted.
What's not here yet
The AI tutor and the "talk to a scientist" characters are intentionally not built yet. A tutor that is confidently wrong would do real harm, so that part waits until it can be grounded in the course material and clearly labelled. What is here is the reading: thirty lessons, each one finished before it went up.
Scope follows the syllabus
The chapters here are the chapters of Prof. Deppmann's one-semester biochemistry course, start to finish. Three sit outside it. An interlude on alchemy and vitalism opens the sequence, because the question of what makes living matter different from the rest is where the field starts. Two supplements close it: nucleotide metabolism, and a survey that puts the whole of metabolism back together. None of the three is on the syllabus. They are here for anyone who wants to keep going.