In school I learned how, when cells need energy, ATP releases it. Supposedly, there is now a chunk of energy floating around in the cell? What is this “energy”? What is it made of? How does it get from the mitochondria way over to the part of the cell that needed it? How does it get put to use? I feel like school is leaving out a huge amount of important information.
EDIT:
So far, the answers boil down to:
1) When cells need energy, ATP releases it.
2) Our cells figure out how to get the energy where it needs to go, somehow.
3) You’re not allowed to know the answer until you go to college, sorry.
Um… thanks?
In: 4
Oh it would take a huge amount of time to explain this correctly, especially since you would have to talk a lot about physics in biology class, so the teachers would have to work together if they want to know where to begin. Actually, everything that matters to us is energy. Matter is energy, movement is energy. You could say that matter is movement, but I’m not expert enough to write that confidently. When you pull the string of a bow, you are putting energy (from your body) into the bow. You can release this energy (from the bow) to launch an arrow. This is similar to what our bodies do with ADP: by adding another phosphate group “against its will”, they “pull the string of the bow” and it becomes ATP. The string then wants to be released again, which would put the energy somewhere else. But ATP is more like a crossbow, which secures the string and allows the energy to be released somewhere else. ADP+P would be a more stable configuration for the molecules, so as soon as they “find” a place that takes the extra energy, they will react and split. Our cells do the science of influencing at which location this reaction happens.
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