Chemically Assemble Polymers
We might think that complex polymers are the result of human industrial ingenuity, but nature cornered the market on polymers billions of years earlier. Examples of biopolymers are proteins, carbohydrates, and genetic material. In contrast to human industrial processes, within a cell, ribosomes covalently bond amino acids together to form proteins.
Chemically Assemble Organic Compounds
Part of the reason that synthesis reactions (chemical assembly) can occur under such mild conditions as ambient temperature and pressure in water is because most often, they occur in a stepwise, enzyme-mediated fashion, sipping or releasing small amounts of energy at each step. For example, the synthesis of glucose from carbon dioxide in the Calvin cycle is a 15-step process, each step regulated by a different enzyme.
Chemically Break Down Polymers
The vast majority of biochemical assembly and breakdown processes–even by the most complex organisms–occur within cells. In fact, cells are able to perform hundreds, even thousands of chemical transformations at the same time under life-friendly conditions (ambient temperature and pressure in an aqueous environment). For example, one of the biochemical pathways that break down proteins into their constituent amino acids is the protease enzyme-catalyzed processes that occur within the confined space of the lysosome–a membrane bound organelle in eukaryotic cells.
