That is friggin’ cool!
Ao why tha fuck we be eating then.
Is that saying it still needs food and is just what’s going on as the food is digested?
Your body burns the food you eat in much the same way that a fire burns some kind of fuel, be it wood, gas, oil, etc. The fire rapidly combines atmospheric oxygen with molecules in the fuel to make carbon dioxide and releases the energy in the chemical bonds of the fuel as heat and light. On the other hand, your body combines the food with oxygen that you breathe in a controlled manner (also producing CO2), harvesting the energy of those chemical bonds to power those turbines that produce ATP. ATP is just a molecule that holds a lot of energy in its chemical bonds. It’s the “energy currency” of life, providing the overwhelming majority of the energy required by other molecules as they do their jobs in your body (think of your muscles contracting). ATP is the convenient, universal way to move around energy in living systems. Can’t do none of this shit without breathing and eating.
It’s making ADP into ATP iirc, right?
You’ve got it! It’s adding a third phosphate group to adenosine to store energy. Interestingly, it’s the same adenosine as the ‘A’ base in DNA & RNA.
And if you get poisoned with 2,4-DNP, your ATP will make you into a thermal power plant before you die of uncontrolled hyperthermia!
I worked in bioelectrochemostry. We had looked into that to see if we could juice reactors. Turns out it’s not the bugs that limit things, but godamn did that stuff make them boogie.
There is also a Mycotoxin ATP Inhibitor called Tri-Nitro-Propionic Acid, which causes complete organ failure after a couple of days of being unconsious (because the body keeps attempting to create ineffective ATP and then starves). It generally only gets produced by certain fungal strains such as tropical Arthrinium, but can also be a very small percentage biproduct in some biofuel production methoda which utilize propionibacteria to conver grains and grasses similarly to how yeast creates alcohol.
Anyhow, that’s why I’m freebasing creatine now.
