Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP)

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Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP)

Introduction

The paper covers the biological process of ATP as an energy currency. ATP is the "energy currency" of the body, but it is also the focus of many researchers who seek to find new ways to treat cancer. Research ways scientists are using ATP inhibitors to fight cancer.

Energy Currency-ATP

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the principal means for moving energy around in the cell. ATP is a small molecule with three principal components: a nitrogenous base called adenine, a five-carbon sugar called ribose, and three phosphate groups. The adenine-ribose combination with a single phosphate group is the nucleotide called adenylic acid (Darnell, Lodish and Baltimore, 1996). You will recognize adenylic acid as one of the two nucleotides in NAD and NADP. You may also remember this molecule as one of the four building blocks in DNA and RNA. The only difference is the absence of one oxygen atom on the ribose molecule in DNA, which makes it a deoxyribose sugar (Behe, 1996

The primary energy currency of cellular reactions, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), consists of three phosphate groups, a ribose sugar, and an adenine base. When only two phosphate groups are present, the compound is known as adenosine diphosphate (ADP); when there is only one phosphate, the compound is adenosine monophosphate (AMP) (Behe, 1996).

ATP is a lot like a rechargeable battery. It is charged with energy in the chloroplast or mitochondrion by adding a phosphate group toadenosine diphosphate (ADP). The energy of ATP is then tapped by transferring that same phosphate group from ATP to another molecule, which is a process called phosphorylation (Goodsell, 1996). The recipient might be a protein, a sugar, or almost any other kind of molecule. Indeed, the cell runs almost exclusively on phosporylated molecules and the principal source of phosphate groups is ATP. When a phosphate group is transferred from ATP, the energy associated with that phosphate group goes along with it and the leftover ADP molecule is available to be recharged. A metabolically active cell may require as many as several million ATP molecules every second (Hickman, 1997). However, the cellular ATP/ADP pool is actually rather small, so ATP and ADP must turn over very rapidly.

Laws of Thermodynamics

Interest in the study of energy began in the 19th century through efforts to understand how steam engines worked and why heat was generated when boring out cannon barrels. These efforts gave rise to a whole ...