In this video, we're going to begin our lesson on Glycerophospholipids. Now before we actually define Glycerophospholipids, it would be helpful to first define the more generalized class of just phospholipids, which, as you can see, is embedded in the word glycerophospholipids. Phospholipids are a generalized class of lipids. They are a large class of lipids that include lots of different molecules. As the name implies, phospholipids are literally just lipids that contain at least one phosphate group. Phospholipids are a major component of all cell membranes. Later in our course, we're going to talk a lot more about cell membranes. It's important to keep in mind that phospholipids are a major component of all cell membranes.
We know that phospholipids are fatty acid-based lipids because they contain at least one fatty acid molecule that is linked to a phosphorylated platform molecule. If we take a look at our image down below at our phospholipid over here, notice that we have a platform molecule here, and this is a phosphorylated platform molecule because you can see the phosphate group attached to the platform molecule. You can tell that phospholipids are indeed fatty acid-based because they have at least one fatty acid chain. Here we are showing two fatty acid chains, but really, they just need at least one fatty acid chain. This platform molecule can be different molecules. If the phosphorylated platform molecule is a glycerol molecule, then it would be considered a Glycerophospholipid.
You can see that by changing the platform specifically to a glycerol molecule, like this one right here, what we'll get is a Glycerophospholipid, which we'll talk a lot more about in our next lesson video. But also notice that the platform molecule could be something else other than a glycerol molecule. It could be a different molecule that we're just going to label as platform number 2 for now until we get to this later in our course. But keep in mind that we can get different phospholipids just by changing the platform molecule. We're going to focus on the glycerol platform molecule here and talk about glycerophospholipids in our next video. So I'll see you guys there.