Thermodynamic Equilibrium in Large Scale Biochemistry

The biochemists who work on the thermodynamics of biochemistry see the world quite differently than chemical engineers do, and would rarely express biochemical equilibrium the way it is shown the first three examples above. The main reasons for this are  

For inorganic and organic chemistry we can find the values of g° for most or all of the reactants and products in our reactions from short tables like Table A. 8 or the much more extensive tables in [12] or the NIST web site [13]. But those sites rarely if ever show the pure species g° for biochemical materials, such as sucrose (see Problem 16.1). 

Because the reactions of interest to biochemists almost all occur in aqueous solutions, they are rarely concerned with pure reactants or products. Their published g° values are for the materials in solution, at specified values of the pH and/or the concentrations of various metallic ions. 

If the necessary g° values are known, the computation of the equilibrium K is worthwhile, giving some idea of the feasibility of the reaction. But for most industrial biochemistry (e.g., the fermentation route to ethanol) other factors, like the life story of the yeasts, play a much more important role in deciding what can be done and how to do it than does the equilibrium K. 

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