Respiratory ignorance
Aug. 19th, 2017 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI have a good general science background that has served me well in my favored activity of learning about technical problems then devising software solutions. My biology background is probably the patchiest: while I worked in computational genomics, then was principal investigator on a half-million-dollar biophysics project, and now work in a computational biology division, my highest formal biology qualification is my B at GCSE so there is much I do not know.
I got to thinking about the different ways in which organisms respire. Cows and grass respire rather differently and some of the microorganisms breaking down the grass inside the cow do something different again. Yeast has multiple tricks which is how we can use it both in beer-making and in making our bread rise. I got to wondering, are there more ways of respiring? Further, could a single hypothetical organism practically employ all of them? I cannot recall anything real that can both photosynthesize and respire aerobically. I also do not know how universal the basic reactions are: I would guess that strange organisms like ctenophores still use ATP and similar.
Still, as usual with learning anything relevant to microbiology, it turns out to be more complex than I had hoped. To get a good handle on how these kinds of respiration may usefully coexist, even synergize, I now find that I would need a rather large blackboard for piecing the story together, to include the Krebs cycle and Calvin cycle and all manner of things, beyond the scope of what I can easily fit in to when I am both unpaid and neither tired nor asleep. Separately I wonder why Americans have not turned
I got to thinking about the different ways in which organisms respire. Cows and grass respire rather differently and some of the microorganisms breaking down the grass inside the cow do something different again. Yeast has multiple tricks which is how we can use it both in beer-making and in making our bread rise. I got to wondering, are there more ways of respiring? Further, could a single hypothetical organism practically employ all of them? I cannot recall anything real that can both photosynthesize and respire aerobically. I also do not know how universal the basic reactions are: I would guess that strange organisms like ctenophores still use ATP and similar.
Still, as usual with learning anything relevant to microbiology, it turns out to be more complex than I had hoped. To get a good handle on how these kinds of respiration may usefully coexist, even synergize, I now find that I would need a rather large blackboard for piecing the story together, to include the Krebs cycle and Calvin cycle and all manner of things, beyond the scope of what I can easily fit in to when I am both unpaid and neither tired nor asleep. Separately I wonder why Americans have not turned
aerobicinto
erobic.
