Steroids & Waxes

in this video, we're going to briefly introduced to other classes of lipids the steroids and the waxes. And so steroids are a complex class of lipid that look a lot different than the other lipids that we've talked about. And that's because steroids are not made up of fatty acids. Instead, steroids are lipids that are made up of four fused carbon ring structures. And a classic example of a steroid is actually the molecule cholesterol, which you may have heard of before because cholesterol is a common steroid that's important for the structure of animal cell membranes. And so if we take a look at our image down below, over here on the left hand side, notice that here, this molecule that we're showing you is cholesterol and cholesterol is a steroid because notice that it has thes four fused carbon ring structures that we have numbered 123 and four yeah, and cholesterol. Azzawi mentioned up above is a common steroid that's important for the structure and animal cell membranes. And so, over here on the right, we're showing you a zoom in of an animal cell membrane. And so, of course, we know from our last lesson video that one of the major components of cell membranes are these Foss full lipids which were showing you over here. These all these structures are fossil lipids, but embedded within the cell membrane and embedded within thes fossil lipids are thes cholesterol molecules. So you can see the cholesterol in these positions that we see here. And so we'll get to talk Maura about the actual function of cholesterol in the cell membrane later in our course when we're focusing specifically on the cell membrane. But for now, this year concludes our introduction to steroids. Now, the other class of lipid that we're gonna briefly talk about are the waxes. And so waxes are again another class of lipid that can be used for protection purposes and also for the prevention of water loss. And so, if you take a look at the image over here on the right hand side, what we're showing you here is a structure that is a classic example of a wax. And that's because this structure is bees wax, which is why we're showing you a B over here. And so bees wax, which will notice is made up of a fatty acid. You could see a fatty acid embedded in here, but it also contains another molecule over here that used to be a long chain alcohol group. But really, the idea here is that waxes, uh, they can be used for protection purposes and prevention of water loss. And they are You need to know that waxes are a class of lipid, so both steroids and waxes are types of lipids. And really, that's the main take away here of this video. So this year concludes our introduction to steroids and waxes, and we'll be able to get some practice in our next couple of videos, so I'll see you all there.