>>11999072are you asking specifically metabolic pathways? one answer cancers often preferentially loop glycolysis to enable survival under hypoxic conditions, and metabolic byproducts can be very reactive and enhance destabilization of gene regulation or even fuck with signaling pathways
as a general question of how do you apply broad info in molecular biology - you memorize so many things that it becomes second-nature, and then you increase the detail and create interesting hypothetical scenarios of perturbations etc to better understand the pathways you're studying, until you can start to see broad patterns
eventually, then you realize broad patterns are useless and you spend the rest of your life studying specific aspects of things. or not, haha. one of the challenges of molecular biology is just affirming that you did a thing and it actually happened - look into fluorescence microscopy and confocal microscopy - and these are just microscopy examples, often you'd use a variety of assays to achieve similar affirmation of efficacy. half the battle in genetics, for example, is designing a crossing schema or other genetic mechanism to ensure that what you want to happen is going to be present and (often) linked to an obvious phenotypic marker, or clever use of balancer chrs, etc. there's so much work that just goes into proving you did what you set out to do, let alone finding out that what you set out to do actually achieved the goal in and produced X meaningful result (be it demonstrating that an epigenetic phenomena works the way you suspected, or that a signaling pathway uses the receptors that you expected, or that X has Y effect on actin polymerization under Z conditions, etc etc etc.)
In fact, it's so much work that it really takes a lot of passion to put up with (and actually enjoy) the process of getting A -> B, which can lead to lots of burnouts and also cutthroat competition in some cases (desirable grad schools)
