SCIENCE@home

Is an Entropy-Based Approach Suitable for an Understanding of the Metabolic Pathways of Fermentation and Respiration?

R. Zivieri,N. Pacini

Published 2017 in Entropy

ABSTRACT

Lactic fermentation and respiration are important metabolic pathways on which life is based. Here, the rate of entropy in a cell associated to fermentation and respiration processes in glucose catabolism of living systems is calculated. This is done for both internal and external heat and matter transport according to a thermodynamic approach based on Prigogine’s formalism. It is shown that the rate of entropy associated to irreversible reactions in fermentation processes is higher than the corresponding one in respiration processes. Instead, this behaviour is reversed for diffusion of chemical species and for heat exchanges. The ratio between the rates of entropy associated to the two metabolic pathways has a space and time dependence for diffusion of chemical species and is invariant for heat and irreversible reactions. In both fermentation and respiration processes studied separately, the total entropy rate tends towards a minimum value fulfilling Prigogine’s minimum dissipation principle and is in accordance with the second principle of thermodynamics. The applications of these results could be important for cancer detection and therapy.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2017

  • Venue

    Entropy

  • Publication date

    2017-12-04

  • Fields of study

    Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.3390/e19120662
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-41 of 41 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-11 of 11 citing papers · Page 1 of 1