Glycolysis Energetics - Biochemistry

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Question

For each mol of glucose oxidized via cellular respiration, how many total moles of ATP are generated through substrate-level phorphorylation?

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Answer

Cellular respiration is a long process, and so it is easiest to break it into the following steps:

Step 1: Glycolysis

Step 2: Pyruvate decarboxylation

Step 3: Krebs cycle

Step 4: Oxidative phosphorylation

In the above steps, ATP is only produced by substrate-level phosphorylation in glycolysis and during the Krebs cycle.

In glycolysis, two molecules of pyruvate are produced for every molecule of glucose oxidized. During this process, two ATP molecules are consumed, but four are produced via substrate-level phosphorylation.

In the Krebs cycle, each pass of pyruvate through the cycle generates one molecule of GTP, which is subsequently used to generate a molecule of ATP via substrate-level phosphorylation. Thus, one molecule of ATP is produced via substrate-level phosphorylation per molecule of pyruvate oxidized. But remember that glycolysis produces two molecules of pyruvate for each molecule of glucose oxidized. Hence, the Krebs cycle will contribute a total of two molecules of ATP per glucose molecule oxidized.

Since we have a total of four moles ATP from glycolysis and two moles of ATP from the Krebs cycle (one per pyruvate), we have a cumulative production of six moles of ATP generated by substrate-level phosphorylation per mole of glucose oxidized.

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