Mitochondrial energy conversions

The mesoscopic size regime is also relevant to organic chemistry and biochemistry since many biological mechanisms, including information transmission across cell membranes, ribosomal protein synthesis, mitochondrial energy conversion, and enzymatic reactions, occur within complexes at the mesoscopic level. For construction of functional mesoscopic structures from organic and biological components, bottom-up... 

Indeed, the mathematical form of the mixed-potential concept (Bockris, 1954) has been applied to a number of chemical processes which, it has been shown, in fact, consist of two partnered surface electrochemical processes (Spiro, 1984). Thus, energy conversion processes at the surface of mitochondrial cells may involve the electrochemical oxidation of glucose as the anodic reaction and the electrochemical reduction of oxygen as the cathodic (Gutmann, 1985). 

Cytochrome c has a number of vital functions inside the cell. As part of the mitochondrial electron transport chain in respiration, it shuttles redox equivalents to cytochrome c oxidase (28), which can be considered as a kind of natural fuel cell for energy conversion. Mitochondrial dysfunction accompanied with changes in cytochrome c oxidase activity, however, seems to be intimately related to aging, neurodegeneration, and disease (29). Effects that can manipulate the fimctions of such redox enz5unes are therefore of great importance for many research fields. 

However, in Nanotechnology Research Directions (a report pubfished by the US government in 1999), it was pointed out that current nanoscale technologies are still highly inferior to those seen in natural systems. The efficiency of the energy conversion that occurs in mitochondrial and photosynthetic systems far exceeds those obtained in artificial systems. A dog can smell and a bat can hear far more sensitively than most artificial sensors. The information pro-... 

One of the more challenging locations, therefore, for consideration of the comprehensive hydrophobic effect in the panoply of biological energy conversions is the electron transport chain embedded within the inner mitochondrial membrane. Essential parts of these protein-based machines insert into and function in very hydrophobic lipid bilayers. Here the ingress and egress of protons for develop-... 

In general, then, the energy conversions of biology reduce to the production of ATP and the uses of ATP, that is, the production of ATP by the five protein-based machines of the inner mitochondrial membrane and the thousands of subsequent protein-based machines that do the necessary work of the cell. This constitutes yet an enormous task that will fill hundreds of volumes in the future of protein-based machines. The intention of this volume, however, is to add a simplifying feature of a common groundwork of explanation for each of the hydrophobic and elastic consilient mechanisms. For the function of protein-based machines of biology, this perspective recovers an attractive element of simplification. 

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