Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

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Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

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Lane’s thesis is that biochemists have misunderstood the cycle and therefore underestimated it. Textbooks, he says, essentially treat it as a mechanism for obtaining energy from food. But Krebs is also a chemical factory, manufacturing key components of cells. And cells can run it in various ways, so there is no one Krebs cycle. Lane compares it to a furiously busy roundabout, with different vehicles constantly whizzing in from different junctions and hurtling out on others. Fuller, Barry; Benson, Erica, eds. (2004). Life in the Frozen State. CRC Press. ISBN 978-0415247009. His second book, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (OUP, 2005) is an exploration of the extraordinary effects that mitochondria have had on the evolution of complex life. It was selected as one of The Economist's Books of the Year for 2005, and shortlisted for the 2006 Royal Society Aventis Science Book Prize and the Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year Award. On average, we have one SNP every thousand letters, meaning that there are four or five million letters that differ across the human genome. Only a modest proportion of these are likely to influence the risk of a particular disease

October 2006). "Cell biology: Power games". Nature. 443 (7114): 901–903. Bibcode: 2006Natur.443..901L. doi: 10.1038/443901a. PMID 17066004. S2CID 4430396. Most of us know the Krebs cycle as a cycle of biochemical reactions linked to energy generation in cells. In short, when we burn fuels like glucose in cell respiration, we first break them down into simpler molecules composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. These are the intermediates that make up the Krebs cycle. Then we strip out the carbon as CO 2, and we burn the hydrogen in oxygen. The energy released is used to power an electrical charge on the membranes deep within our cells. This charge is as intense as a bolt of lightning—if you shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule, you’d feel an electrical charge of 30 million volts per meter! The response to drugs can vary dramatically, depending on a few tiny differences in mitochondrial DNA, with big differences in outcome between males and females. Lane is British and makes no concessions to American English. Experiments work “first go,” not first try. We fly in aeroplanes and put on jumpers instead of sweaters. And in the fall, perhaps we engage in a programme of maths or simply enjoy the tonne of colours in the trees.If that weren’t enough, Lane even suggests that the electromagnetic fields generated by metabolic processes like Krebs may be the underpinning of consciousness.

I thought the best part of the book was how the author detailed the scientists’ quest to discover those elusive secrets. I also quite enjoyed the appendix and source material that he used. Rather than just a list of articles and books, the author took the time to review most of the research material in detail, giving the reader many starting points should they wish to further investigate the subject on their own. In Transformer, Lane indulges in a great many of the banes of popular science writing (derived, one feels certain, from pandering to slab-faced phone-scrollers in lecture halls), including the creaky dad-slang that has stuff like “the dark side,” “the flux capacitor,” and “fake news” cropping up throughout the book. These kinds of over-earnest attempts to defang a complicated subject are an enduring mystery; the people who need them won’t read the book, and the people who’ll read the book don’t need them. But here they are, like your awkward uncle on TikTok. Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformeris Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle—and its reverse—why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today. I’ve used the word flux a few times already, and I’ll use it again throughout the book. Before getting any further, let’s pause for a moment to clarify exactly what I mean by it. Flux is a form of flow, but with one crucial difference. Water can flow in a river, or traffic down a street. What goes in at one end and what comes out at the other is the same thing – water, or cars. In biochemistry, flux is the flow of things that are trans- formed along the way. Imagine a car entering a street; let’s say it’s a VW Beetle. No sooner has it gone ten yards down than there’s a blinding flash and it abruptly turns into a Porsche. Then another flash and it’s become a Volvo. Bang! It’s a white van. Zap! Now it’s a minibus. Flash! It’s a tractor, which leaves the street. But the strangest thing about this street is that the same thing keeps on happening: only VW Beetles ever enter the street; only tractors ever leave. The same succession of trans- formations takes place each time. Let’s imagine that sixty VW Beetles enter the street every minute, one per second. Each of them is transformed in a series of blinding flashes into sixty tractors. That’s flux: the total number of vehicles that passes down the street, each one transformed into the same type of tractor. Of course, that’s just this street. Take a look at the street around the corner. There you’ll see only Vespa scooters entering, transforming into Harley motorbikes. And just across town there’s a canal where canoes change into speed boats. For anyone, who has "suffered" through memorizing the Krebs/citric acid cycle as presented in biochemistry, this is the rest of the story. For the conventional dogma is so narrow and incomplete that in maybe only a few exceptional courses, does one get an idea of just how much more there is and how that fits in with the whole picture of metabolism.Your book argues that the flow of energy and matter structures the evolution of life and is how metabolism “ conjures genes into existence. ” What’s the most compelling reason to think metabolism, not genetic information, evolved first? In vivo studies of ischaemia-reperfusion injury in hypothermically stored rabbit renal autograft (1995) Tirard, Stephane (20 April 2015). "Abiogenesis". Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. p.1. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_2-4. ISBN 978-3-642-27833-4.

Every life sciences major remembers learning about the Krebs cycle in college; if your undergraduate experience was anything like mine, then you also remember forgetting it immediately. When we learn about this cycle at the heart of metabolism, it’s presented almost exclusively in the context of energy production. Producing ATP is important, but so is generating the macromolecules that come to constitute tissues and organs. Metabolism does both, utilizing the Krebs cycle as a sort of roundabout to accomplish the needs of the cell. Transformer is a monstrous tome. And it's even more of a chimera in audiobook form. Having read the author's previous book, The Vital Question, I knew a bit of what to expect, a high-level explanation of an important biochemical process, with all the history, false starts, important scientists and, most crucially, the chemistry behind it.The gerontology community has been talking along these lines for 10 to 20 years. The greatest risk factor for age-related diseases isn’t mutations; it’s being old. If we could solve the underlying process of aging, then we could cure most age-related diseases. It seems tantalizingly simple in many respects. Are we really going to suddenly live to 120 or 800? I don’t see it happening sometime soon. But then the question is, why not? Why do we age? What causes the mounting cellular damage? What’s new is that the reactions that make up the Krebs cycle and onwards can occur spontaneously. The Krebs cycle is the engine of life, turning gases into living things. Genes emerged from this metabolic whirl. But now we’re faced with a strange situation: the Krebs cycle simultaneously creates and destroys, giving it a yin and yang that (I argue) still dictates how our genes work, including our risk of diseases. 2. Metabolism gives meaning to genetic information. Marshall, Michael (11 November 2020). "Charles Darwin's hunch about early life was probably right - In a few scrawled notes to a friend, biologist Charles Darwin theorised how life began. Not only was it probably correct, his theory was a century ahead of its time". BBC News . Retrieved 11 November 2020. I read several of previous Lane's books, namely Vital Question, Life Ascending and Oxygen. My thinking about origins of life was since dominantly shaped by his work, which filled a major gap for me in my worldview about abiogenesis. Lane seems firmly established in the scientific establishment — he’s a professor at University College London — but his book carries a whiff of the heretic. He’s glad that “the simplistic notion that genes control metabolism is beginning to unravel” but frustrated that “the idea that mutations cause cancer remains the dominant paradigm”— a paradigm that, to his mind, is “too close to dogma.” He also states plainly: “I want to turn the standard view upside down.”



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