are lipids organic or inorganic
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lipid, any of a diverse group of organic compounds including fats, oils, hormones, and certain components of membranes that are grouped together because they do not interact appreciably with water.
One type of lipid, the triglycerides, is sequestered as fat in adipose cells, which serve as the energy-storage depot for organisms and also provide thermal insulation. Some lipids such as steroid hormones serve as chemical messengers between cells, tissues, and organs, and others communicate signals between biochemical systems within a single cell.
The membranes of cells and organelles (structures within cells) are microscopically thin structures formed from two layers of phospholipid molecules. Membranes function to separate individual cells from their environments and to compartmentalize the cell interior into structures that carry out special functions. So important is this compartmentalizing function that membranes, and the lipids that form them, must have been essential to the origin of life itself.
Many Forms of Lipids
Lipids are another type of organic molecule. Remember that organic means they contain carbon (C) atoms. It’s not like organic farming at all. When you think of fats, you should know that they are lipids. Lipids are also used to make steroids and waxes. So, if you pick out some earwax and smell it, that’s a lipid, too!
Get the Wax Out of Your Ears
Waxes are used to coat and protect things in nature. Bees make wax. It can be used for structures, such as the bees’ honeycombs. Your ears make wax. It is used to protect the inside of your ear. Plants use wax to stop evaporation of water from their leaves. There is a compound called cutin that you can find in the plant cuticle covering the surface of leaves. It helps to seal and protect plant structures. Don’t worry about plants being able to breathe. There are still small holes that let gases in and out of the leaves.
Steroids
Steroids are found in animals within something called hormones. The basis of a steroid molecule is a four-ring structure: one ring with five carbons and three rings with six carbons. You may have heard of steroids in the news. Many bodybuilders and athletes have used anabolic steroids to build muscle mass.
The steroids make their bodies add more muscle than they would normally be able to. Those anabolic steroids help bodybuilders wind up stronger and bulkier (but not faster). Steroids are also used in necessary medicines. Some help people with acne, while others are used as muscle relaxers for injuries.
NOTE: Never take drugs to enhance your body. Those athletes are actually hurting their bodies. They can’t see it, because it is slowly destroying their internal organs and not the muscles. When they get older, they can have kidney and liver problems. Some even die.
Triglycerides
Fat is also known as a triglyceride. It is made up of a molecule known as glycerol that is connected to one, two, or three fatty acids. Glycerol is the basis of all fats and is made up of a three-carbon chain that connects the fatty acids together. A fatty acid is just a long chain of carbon atoms connected to each other.
Saturated and Unsaturated
There are two kinds of fats, saturated and unsaturated. Unsaturated fats have at least one double bond in one of the fatty acids. A double bond happens when four electrons are shared or exchanged in a bond. They are much stronger than single bonds with only two electrons. Saturated fats have no double bonds.
Fats have a lot of energy stored up in their molecular bonds. That’s why the human body stores fat as an energy source. When you have extra sugars in your system, your body converts them into fats. When it needs extra fuel, your body breaks down the fat and uses the energy. Where one molecule of sugar only gives a small amount of energy, a fat molecule gives off many times more.
Fatty acids
Fatty acids rarely occur as free molecules in nature but are usually found as components of many complex lipid molecules such as fats (energy-storage compounds) and phospholipids (the primary lipid components of cellular membranes). This section describes the structure and physical and chemical properties of fatty acids. It also explains how living organisms obtain fatty acids, both from their diets and through metabolic breakdown of stored fats.
Structure
Biological fatty acids, members of the class of compounds known as carboxylic acids, are composed of a hydrocarbon chain with one terminal carboxyl group (COOH).
The fragment of a carboxylic acid not including the hydroxyl (OH) group is called an acyl group. Under physiological conditions in water, this acidic group usually has lost a hydrogen ion (H+) to form a negatively charged carboxylate group (COO−). Most biological fatty acids contain an even number of carbon atoms because the biosynthetic pathway common to all organisms involves chemically linking two-carbon units together (although relatively small amounts of odd-number fatty acids do occur in some organisms).
Although the molecule as a whole is water-insoluble by virtue of its hydrophobic hydrocarbon chain, the negatively charged carboxylate is hydrophilic. This common form for biological lipids—one that contains well-separated hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts—is called amphipathic.
Saturated fatty acids
The simplest fatty acids are unbranched, linear chains of CH2 groups linked by carbon-carbon single bonds with one terminal carboxylic acid group. The term saturated indicates that the maximum possible number of hydrogen atoms are bonded to each carbon in the molecule. Many saturated fatty acids have a trivial or common name as well as a chemically descriptive systematic name. The systematic names are based on numbering the carbon atoms, beginning with the acidic carbon.
The table gives the names and typical biological sources of the most common saturated fatty acids. Although the chains are usually between 12 and 24 carbons long, several shorter-chain fatty acids are biochemically important. For instance, butyric acid (C4) and caproic acid (C6) are lipids found in milk. Palm kernel oil, an important dietary source of fat in certain areas of the world, is rich in fatty acids that contain 8 and 10 carbons (C8 and C10).
Unsaturated fatty acids
Unsaturated fatty acids have one or more carbon-carbon double bonds. The term unsaturated indicates that fewer than the maximum possible number of hydrogen atoms are bonded to each carbon in the molecule. The number of double bonds is indicated by the generic name—monounsaturated for molecules with one double bond or polyunsaturated for molecules with two or more double bonds. Oleic acid is an example of a monounsaturated fatty acid.
Common representative monounsaturated fatty acids together with their names and typical sources are listed in the table. The prefix cis-9 in the systematic name of palmitoleic acid denotes that the position of the double bond is between carbons 9 and 10. Two possible conformations, cis and trans, can be taken by the two CH2 groups immediately adjacent to the double-bonded carbons.
In the cis configuration, the one occurring in all biological unsaturated fatty acids, the two adjacent carbons lie on the same side of the double-bonded carbons. In the trans configuration, the two adjacent carbons lie on opposite sides of the double-bonded carbons.
Substituent groups
In addition to the very common fatty acids with straight saturated or unsaturated acyl chains, many fatty acids are chemically modified by substituents on the hydrocarbon chain.
For example, the preening gland of ducks secretes a fatty acid 10 carbons long with methyl (CH3) groups substituted for one of the hydrogens on carbons 2, 4, 6, and 8. Some bacteria produce fatty acids that have a methyl group on the carbon atom farthest from the acidic group or on the penultimate carbon. Other bacteria incorporate a cyclopropane ring near the centre of the acyl chain.
The bacterium that causes tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) synthesizes a whole family of cyclopropane-containing fatty acids called α-mycolic acids. Similar fatty acids are found in related bacteria. A third common constituent is a hydroxyl group (OH). Monohydroxyl acids are found in both plants and animals in relatively small amounts, but they are more prevalent in bacteria.
Physical properties
Pure fatty acids form crystals that consist of stacked layers of molecules, with each layer the thickness of two extended molecules. The molecules in a layer are arranged so that the hydrophobic (water-fearing) hydrocarbon chains form the interior of the layer and the hydrophilic (water-loving) carboxylic acid groups form the two faces. For a specific fatty acid the details of the molecular packing may vary, giving rise to different crystal forms known as polymorphs.
The melting temperatures of saturated fatty acids of biological interest are above 27 °C (81 °F) and rise with increasing length of the hydrocarbon chain. Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated molecules melt at substantially lower temperatures than do their saturated analogs, with the lowest melting temperatures occurring when the carbon-carbon double bonds are located near the centre of the hydrocarbon chain, as they are in most biological molecules. As a result, these molecules form viscous liquids at room temperature.
The hydrophobic character of the hydrocarbon chain of most biological fatty acids exceeds the hydrophilic nature of the carboxylic acid group, making the water solubility of these molecules very low. For example, at 25 °C (77 °F) the solubility in grams of fatty acid per gram of solution is 3 × 10−6. Water solubility decreases exponentially with the addition of each carbon atom to the hydrocarbon chain.
Chemical properties
The most chemically reactive portion of fatty acids is the acidic carboxyl group (COOH). It reacts with alcohols (R′OH) to form products known as esters (RCOOR′) and releases water in the process. This ester bond is the principal covalent bond linking fatty acid moieties to other groups in the more-complex lipids discussed in other sections of this article. A second chemical bond, occurring much less frequently in biological lipids involving fatty acids, is the ether bond (R′―O―R). Ether bonds are chemically more stable than ester bonds.
