SECTION I: LIFE AND ENERGY
Lec 1. What is life? An attempt at definition. Energy, heat, and work: Temperature and thermal equilibrium. The First Law. Why do organisms need energy? (B. Lentz)
Lec 2. Mother Nature plays dice: the Boltzmann distribution, partition functions and entropy. (B. Lentz)
Lec 3. Thermodynamic states and state functions. Reversible and real processes. The Second Law and free energy. (B. Lentz)

SECTION II: THE CELL: SURVEY & PREVIEW
Lec 4. The cell as a basic unit of life's organization. (Z. Chen)
Lec 5. The cell interior as a tough neighborhood: Brownian motion and viscosity and their influence on particle motion in the cell. (Z. Chen)

SECTION III. NUCLEIC ACIDS AND GENETIC INFORMATION
Lec 6. Information Depository: Why a double helix? DNA Damage & Repair (D. Ramsden)
Lec 7. How DNA is Packed in the Cell: Chromosomes, Genes, Nucleosomes (B. Strahl)
Lec 8. Ribosomes: Machines that Synthesize Proteins (J. Reader)
Lec 9. DNA Replication and The End of the Chromosome: Aging, Cancer, and Drug Development (M. Jarstfer)

SECTION IV: PROTEIN STRUCTURE & FUNCTION
Lec 10. Proteins: ordered co-polymers that specifically bind other molecules to perform work of the cell (F. Ding)
Lec 11. The structural organization within proteins: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary levels of organization; varieties of proteins: globular and fibrous. Pi Mol exercise (K. Slep)
Lec 12. Proteins are not rigid structures: Protein dynamics/conformational variability. The stability of proteins as measured by free energy and denaturation. (A. Lee)
Lec 13. Speeding things up: how enzymes work. (C. Carter)
Lec 14. Build your own Non-Random Polymers: Protein folding and protein design. (B. Kuhlman)

SECTION V: CELL MEMBRANE STRUCTURE & FUNCTION
Lec 15. The Lipid Bilayer: A Dynamic Self-Assembled Structure of Multiple Lipid Classes. (S. Neher)
Lec 16. Membrane Proteins. (S. Neher)
Lec 17. Membrane Transport & the Chemiosmotic Hypothesis. (G Meissner)
Lec 18. Membranes & Signal Transduction: GTPases. (J. Sondek)

SECTION VI: MOTILITY
Lec 19. How Biological Motors Work: The Enzymology of Mechano-Chemical Energy Transduction (C. Carter)
Lec 20. Stochastic Modeling of Molecular Motors (D. Tsygankov)