So now that we've covered covalent bonds in our previous lesson videos, in this video we're going to introduce non-covalent bonds. Non-covalent bonds are really just defined as interactions between two atoms resulting from full or partial charges. Now, unlike the covalent bonds that we talked about in our previous lesson videos, when it comes to non-covalent bonds, there's absolutely no sharing of electrons. Recall from our previous lesson videos that the word covalent refers to the sharing of electrons. But if we add the "non-" in front of the covalent, of course, that means no sharing of electrons.
That's an important distinction between the covalent and the non-covalent bonds. Now there are several different types of non-covalent bonds that are common in biology. Moving forward in our course, we're going to talk about some of these different types of non-covalent bonds, and you can see that here we're showing you a table of some of the different types of non-covalent bonds, and really they can be broken up into two major groups. There are strong electrostatic interactions and then there are weak Van Der Waals interactions. For our biology course, we're not really going to talk a lot about the weak Van Der Waals interactions.
You'll get to learn more about the weak Van Der Waals interactions in your chemistry courses, but for our biology course moving forward, we're going to focus our attention mainly on the strong electrostatic interactions, and really there are two different types that you should be aware of. There are ionic bonds, and then there are hydrogen bonds. If we take a look at the table, the map that we have down below, you'll see that this table corresponds really nicely with the map. Once again, here is the map of our lesson on chemical bonds, and we know, already in our previous lesson videos, we've been following this map, following the leftmost branches first. So already in our previous lesson videos, we've talked about covalent bonds including non-polar covalent and polar covalent bonds.
So here in this video, we're starting to talk about this other branch here, the non-covalent bonds, and as we mentioned already, they can be broken up into two major groups, the strong electrostatic interactions and then the weak Van Der Waals interactions like this weak little guy over here. Once again, the weak Van Der Waals interactions, we're not really going to talk about in our course moving forward. You'll get to learn more about the weak Van Der Waals interactions when you take your chemistry course. But for our biology course, we're mainly going to focus on these strong electrostatic interactions, which include the ionic bonds and the hydrogen bonds. We'll get to talk more about the ionic and hydrogen bonds moving forward in our course.
We'll start off with the ionic bonds and then after talking about those, we'll move on to talking about the hydrogen bonds. So that being said, I'll see you all in our next video.
