Organic Molecules

Organic molecules found in the cell range from small and simple to large and complex. Small molecules assemble together to build large macromolecules, which fall into four main classes: carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids. With the exception of lipids, all of these macromolecule classes are built by polymerisation - a process in which small repeating subunits, called monomers, are joined end-to-end into chains of varying length. These chains of linked monomers are called polymers. This monomer-to-polymer relationship recurs throughout the chapter: monosaccharides polymerise into polysaccharides, amino acids polymerise into polypeptides/proteins, and nucleotides polymerise into nucleic acids - lipids are the …