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?
In: 0
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.
Latest Answers