BEING SCIENTIST

Congratulations! By the time you reached here you would have taken 6 breaths on average so why is oxygen such an essential contributor to life on earth , why is it the fundamental of the four basic needs that sustains life on earth the others being water food and sunlight . if we humans as a species were to inhabit another planet with an atmosphere that could contain oxygen or not our fate would depend on oxygen but what if it didn’t have to .Is it possible to survive without oxygen as right now that is the only limiting factor for multiplanetary speciation
To get the energy to read this blog you need food , the whole idea of needing oxygen is essentially behind this now lets dwell deep into the biological aspects
food we eat gets broken down into proteins carbohydrates and lipids and fats in a process that we call cellular respiration which is an catabolic process , this tiny particles of food enter our cells protein become amino acids carbohydrates become glucose and fats become fatty acids and glycerol , these particles are now in the cytoplasm of the cell where they enter into a complex process called the glycolytic pathway this process converts glucose into pyruvate which is a 3 carbon molecule this is an 10 step process with intermediates like Glucose-6-phosphate
Fructose-6-phosphate
Fructose-1,6-bisphosphate
Dihydroxyacetone phosphate
Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate
1,3-Bisphosphoglycerate
3-Phosphoglycerate
2-Phosphoglycerate
Phosphoenolpyruvate
and each step is catalyzed by enzymes present in our cells firstly we add phosphate bonds to the molecules utilising energy (ATP) after which in the later steps breaking of the phosphoanhydride bonds releases an enormous amount of energy in the form of ATP which you are currently using to read this blog after which the food particle(now pyruvate) enters another pathway called the link reaction here this pyruvate has to undergo decarboxylation it is this place where we begin to synthesis the carbon dioxide that we let out during respiration . here another energy rich molecule the NADH is also synthesized . next this pyruvate now enters our mitochondria where it begins another process termed the krebs cycle . The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and it is here that we actually use the oxygen we breather but before that through the krebs cycle which takes place in the mitochondrial matrix the food particles (now acetly coa) combines with oxaloacetic acid undergoing a cyclic process that produces 3NADH molecules
now In the end we have 2 ATP and 2 NADH from glycolysis , just two NADH from link reaction and 2atp,6nadh with 2 fadh2 from two turns of krebs cycle(for one glucose )
now all the ATP can be used to carry out tasks like stretching our muscles walking talking etc, but what about the NADP and fadh2 they are not the currency of our cell so to make them into ATP which is the currency of our cell they enter the electron transport chain in the mitochondrial membrane