Enzymes
The term for the minimum amount of energy required to initiate a chemical reaction, which enzymes lower.
What is activation energy?
The main energy currency of the cell, composed of adenine, ribose, and three phosphate groups. (full name and abbrev.)
What is ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate)?
The organelle AND specific location where the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis take place.
What is the thylakoid membrane inside the chloroplast?
The initial metabolic pathway of cellular respiration that breaks down glucose into two pyruvate molecules and occurs in the cytoplasm.
What is glycolysis?
Organisms that produce their own organic compounds using light energy or inorganic chemical sources.
What are autotrophs (or photoautotrophs)?
The region on an enzyme where the substrate binds and the catalytic reaction occurs.
What is the active site?
Reactions that require an input of free energy ( Delta G > 0) and are non-spontaneous.
What are endergonic reactions?
The primary photosynthetic pigment that absorbs blue and red light while reflecting green light.
What is chlorophyll a?
The generation of an electrochemical gradient of hydrogen ions across the inner mitochondrial membrane used by ATP synthase to produce ATP.
What is chemiosmosis?
In cellular respiration, this 2-carbon molecule joins with oxaloacetate (4-carbon) to form citrate (6-carbon) at the start of the Krebs cycle.
What is Acetyl-CoA?
This process occurs when high temperatures or extreme pH levels disrupt hydrogen bonds and alter an enzyme’s tertiary structure, rendering it nonfunctional.
What is denaturation?
The process of driving an endergonic reaction forward by linking it directly to an exergonic reaction, such as ATP hydrolysis.
What is energy coupling?
The process where light energy splits water molecules, producing electrons, protons (H+), and releasing oxygen gas.
What is photolysis?
During pyruvate oxidation, pyruvate is decarboxylated and combined with Coenzyme A to form Acetyl-CoA, producing one molecule of CO2 and one molecule of this electron carrier per pyruvate.
What is NADH?
In the Calvin cycle, this high-energy 3-carbon sugar is generated using ATP and NADPH, two of which can exit the cycle to form a single glucose molecule.
What is G3P (Glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate)?
A molecule that binds to an allosteric site on an enzyme, altering its shape so that the active site can no longer bind the substrate.
What is a noncompetitive inhibitor?
The First Law of Thermodynamics states this about energy in a closed system.
What is energy cannot be created or destroyed (only transformed or transferred)?
The primary enzyme responsible for carbon fixation in the Calvin cycle, which attaches CO2 to RuBP.
What is RuBisCO?
The total net yield of ATP produced per glucose molecule specifically through substrate-level phosphorylation across glycolysis and the Krebs cycle combined.
What is 4 ATP (2 net from glycolysis, 2 from Krebs)?
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, every energy transfer or transformation increases this property of the universe, representing disorder or randomness.
What is entropy?
This model of enzyme kinetics describes how substrate binding causes a conformational change in the enzyme's active site, optimizing the fit and orienting catalytic groups to stabilize the transition state.
What is the induced-fit model?
This mechanism regulates metabolic pathways by using the final end-product to inhibit the first enzyme in the pathway when product levels are high.
What is feedback inhibition (or negative feedback)?
The enzymatic process in C3 plants where RuBisCO fixes oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, consuming ATP and organic carbon while releasing previously fixed CO2 without producing sugar or ATP.
What is photorespiration?
For every single molecule of glucose that enters cellular respiration, the Citric Acid Cycle turns twice to yield this specific combined total of NADH, FADH2, and ATP.
What is 6 NADH, 2 FADH2, and 2 ATP? (10 total molecules)
In mitochondria, cyanides inhibit Complex IV of the electron transport chain, stopping electron flow and halting the production of ATP via this process.
What is oxidative phosphorylation?