Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

If the Krebs cycle is genuinely primordial it must reflect a favoured

The notion that organisms maintain an overall homeostasis by stabilising complementary patterns of metabolic flux in different tissues is less familiar, but the large genomes of eukaryotic cells enable exactly this.

What coordinates all of this?

The problem is not so much the target itself but the context.

the flow of energy and matter through cells structures biological information rather than the other way around.

Mitochondria really are flux capacitors.

the intermediates siphoned off for any biosyntheses must be replaced by an input to the Krebs cycle from elsewhere (what’s called anaplerosis).

it’s much easier to pass electrons onto carbon atoms in an acidic environment, where protons are abundant,

A single molecule of glucose could produce between thirty and thirty-six molecules of ATP through aerobic respiration, but only two molecules of NADPH