This question may be silly but Why cant animals consume ATP or Adenosine triphosphate directly instead of eating and having calories coveted into ATP? Like cant we theoretical produce ATP in a lab or something? Can we solve world hunger with this?
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ATP isn’t very stable, and a system that could take it in undamaged would be wide open for infectious substances. Also, why not eat the entire food when it contains loads of other useful stuff for the body? Gaining energy is only one aspect of eating. There exist symbiotic relationships where organisms (usually plants and fungi) give much more fine-tuned contributions to eath others’ metabolisms, but whether actual ATP is ever exchanged I don’t know.
ATP is incredibly unstable, for one. In a sense, that’s why it’s useful in the first place – it really wants to turn into *not* ATP, and the cell can exploit that – but it also means it’s not going to survive for any meaningful amount of time out in the wild before an organism finds it an eats it. It takes some very carefully controlled conditions just to get ATP to survive the trip from side of the cell to the other.
For another, food doesn’t just give us energy. It gives us all sorts of other nutrients that ATP alone can’t replace. Fatty acids we need to build more cell membranes, amino acids to build new proteins from, coenzymes like thiamine, trace metals for heme cofactors, etc.
The cellular machinery used to “turn food into energy” also does a bunch of other things and can’t simply be gotten rid of without creating new problems. For example, the building of ATP is powered by a buildup of H+ ions around your mitochrondria – H+ ions that ultimately come from food. But your mitochondria *also* use that H+ buildup to generate body heat. And the machinery that creates that H+ ion buildup in the first place, is also responsible for neutralizing oxygen, which would otherwise do damage to your cells.
There are a few reasons for this. For starters, the lifetime of ATP in the body is incredibly short; an individual molecule of ATP cycles between ATP and ADP approximately once per second. It is CONSTANTLY being broken down and built back up. I forget the exact numbers, but in my senior biochemistry class during my undergraduate, our professor told us there’s on the order of 20 grams of ATP in an average human, but the daily need is multiple kilograms. From this we can tell that consuming additional ATP won’t accomplish very much.
Instead, what we can do is consume something called creatine phosphate. Creatine have a higher. Phosphorylation potential than ATP does, which means when ATP is low creatine serves as a sort of ” phosphorylation reservoir” to help restore ATP levels. This is the primary reason why athletes consume the fitness supplement creatine, to boost stamina. In times of maximum exertion (think sprinting), we run out of ATP stores within just a few seconds (then glycogen kicks in). Having a buildup of creatine phosphate extends this amount of time
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