7: Cellular Respiration
Like a generating plant, plants and animals also must take in energy from the environment and convert it into a form that their cells can use. Energy enters an organism’s body in one form and is converted into another form that can fuel the organism’s life functions. In the process of photosynthesis, plants and other photosynthetic producers take in energy in the form of light (solar energy) and convert it into chemical energy, glucose, which stores this energy in its chemical bonds. Then, a series of metabolic pathways, collectively called cellular respiration, extracts the energy from the bonds in glucose and converts it into a form that all living things can use—both producers, such as plants, and consumers, such as animals.
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- 7.0: Prelude to Cellular Respiration
- Energy enters an organism’s body in one form and is converted into another form that can fuel the organism’s life functions. A series of metabolic pathways, collectively called cellular respiration, extracts the energy from the bonds in glucose and converts it into a form that all living things can use—both producers, such as plants, and consumers, such as animals.
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- 7.1: Energy in Living Systems
- Energy production within a cell involves many coordinated chemical pathways. Most of these pathways are combinations of oxidation and reduction reactions. Oxidation and reduction occur in tandem. An oxidation reaction strips an electron from an atom in a compound, and the addition of this electron to another compound is a reduction reaction. Because oxidation and reduction usually occur together, these pairs of reactions are called oxidation reduction reactions, or redox reactions.
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- 7.2: Glycolysis
- Glycolysis is the first step in the breakdown of glucose to extract energy for cellular metabolism. Nearly all living organisms carry out glycolysis as part of their metabolism. The process does not use oxygen and is therefore anaerobic. Glycolysis takes place in the cytoplasm of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.
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- 7.3: Oxidation of Pyruvate and the Citric Acid Cycle
- If oxygen is available, aerobic respiration will go forward. In eukaryotic cells, the pyruvate molecules produced at the end of glycolysis are transported into mitochondria, which are the sites of cellular respiration. There, pyruvate will be transformed into an acetyl group that will be picked up and activated by a carrier compound called coenzyme A (CoA). The resulting compound is called acetyl CoA. CoA is made from vitamin B5, pantothenic acid.
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- 7.4: Oxidative Phosphorylation
- You have just read about two pathways in glucose catabolism—glycolysis and the citric acid cycle—that generate ATP. Most of the ATP generated during the aerobic catabolism of glucose, however, is not generated directly from these pathways. Rather, it is derived from a process that begins with moving electrons through a series of electron transporters that undergo redox reactions. This causes hydrogen ions to accumulate within the matrix space.
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- 7.5: Metabolism without Oxygen
- In aerobic respiration, the final electron acceptor is an oxygen molecule, O2. If aerobic respiration occurs, then ATP will be produced using the energy of high-energy electrons carried by NADH or FADH2 to the electron transport chain. If aerobic respiration does not occur, NADH must be reoxidized to NAD+ for reuse as an electron carrier for the glycolytic pathway to continue.
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- 7.6: Connections of Carbohydrate, Protein, and Lipid Metabolic Pathways
- All of the catabolic pathways for carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids eventually connect into glycolysis and the citric acid cycle pathways. Metabolic pathways should be thought of as porous—that is, substances enter from other pathways, and intermediates leave for other pathways. These pathways are not closed systems. Many of the substrates, intermediates, and products in a particular pathway are reactants in other pathways.
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- 7.7: Regulation of Cellular Respiration
- Cellular respiration must be regulated in order to provide balanced amounts of energy in the form of ATP. The cell also must generate a number of intermediate compounds that are used in the anabolism and catabolism of macromolecules. Without controls, metabolic reactions would quickly come to a stand still as the forward and backward reactions reached a state of equilibrium. Resources would be used inappropriately.
Thumbnail: The generalized structure of a prokaryotic cell. (CC BY 4.0; OpenStax ).