Bioenergetics



Bioenergetics is the subject of a field of thermodynamics[1]

Overview

Growth, development and energy transformations; living organisms survive because of exchange of energy within and without.

In a living organism biochemistry concerned with the energy involved in making and breaking of chemical bonds in the molecules found in biological organisms.

Food molecules are sources of chemical energy for many organisms. Not all metabolizable energy is available for the production of ATP[2]. Some energy is utilized during the metabolic processes associated with digestion, absorption and intermediary metabolism of food and can be measured as heat production; this is referred to as dietary-induced thermogenesis (DIT), or thermic effect of food, and varies with the type of food ingested.

The predator-prey relationships of food chains involve energy transformations within ecosystems and the term "bioenergetics" is also applied to such large-scale transformations of energy.

Chemiosmotic theory

One of the major triumphs of bioenergetics is chloroplasts and many single celled organisms in addition to mitochondria.

References

  1. ^ The Second Law of Thermodynamics in Bioenergetics by Gabor Kemeny in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A (1974) Volume 71 pages 2655–2657.
  2. ^ http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/Y5022E/y5022e04.htm
  3. ^ Peter Mitchell (1961). "Coupling of phosphorylation to electron and hydrogen transfer by a chemi-osmotic type of mechanism". Nature 191: 144–148.Entrez PubMed 13771349

Additional reading

  • "Bioenergetics: The Molecular Basis of Biological Energy Transformations (2nd Edition)" by Albert L. Lehninger. Publisher: Addison-Wesley (1971)
  • "Bioenergetics (3rd Edition)" by David G. Nicholls and Stuart J. Ferguson. Publisher: Academic Press (2002)
  • Universal energy principle of biological systems and the unity of bioenergetics by D E Green and H D Zande in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A (1981) Volume 78 pages 5344–5347.

See also

 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bioenergetics". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.