Mammals can regulate their body heat through a process called thermogenesis. What part of metabolism changes to allow for the production of heat?

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Hello, everyone. Welcome back. Our next question says, organisms produce heat to maintain body temperature and responsible to environmental changes through a process called thermogenesis, which metabolic processes are disrupted in thermogenesis. A glycolysis, B, Citric acid cycle, C electron transport chain and oxidated phosphorylation or D lipid synthesis. Well, to get to this, we may want to think about what are metabolic processes that generate energy because we could sort of, you know, sideline those processes to turn making energy for cellular functions into making heat. So when we think about generating energy, we're going to think about the processes of cellular respiration. Well, that only helps us a little bit because we've got three answer choices here involved in the process of cellular respiration, glycolysis, the citric acid cycle and then the electron transport chain and oxidative phosphorylation. So, lipid synthesis choice D is our outlier here. It's not involved in cellular respiration. Uh It does if you disrupt it, you know lipids. So this this is a way of storing energy in lipids. So if you disrupted that, maybe it'd be releasing energy, but the way you get the energy from the breakdown of lipids is then that those breakdown products going into these processes above. So that would kind of lead us away from that. In addition, thermogenesis occurs in the mitochondria, but in mitochondria and that is not the location of lipid synthesis, it's the wrong location that can also help us rule out glycolysis, which happens in the cytoplasm, not in the mitochondria. But in addition, if we think about the fact that like glycolysis only generates a small amount of energy only a little bit, you know, two molecules of a TP per molecule glucose. So derailing the the glycolysis process is not going to produce a lot of heat. So we'll say not much energy. And that would be the same argument about the citric acid cycle. Even though that does take place in the mitochondria, it doesn't directly produce a lot of energy. It only produces a little bit of a TP. So right, not much energy. Same argument there. It's choice c the electron transport chain and oxidative phosphorylation. That is our big energy generator. And indeed, this is what gets disrupted in the process of thermogenesis. These two processes get uncoupled. So as we recall, the energy that is being harvested by the electron transport chain as the electrons generated by the citric acid cycle move down this chain, that energy is used to pump protons across the membrane. And then as those protons flow down through a TP synthese with their concentration gradient, A TP is synthesized. But the protein thermo genin and brown fat allows protons to leak back into the mitochondrial matrix. The ones that have been pumped across the membrane against their concentration gradient without generating a TP, they generate heat. Instead remember that these protons going through a TP synthese down their concentration gradient. That is an energetically favorable process. It generates energy that gets captured by the synthesis of A TP. So instead that process of protons going down their concentration gradient is used to generate heat, which is usually a form of sort of wasting energy. But in this case, the body needs the heat. So once again, in the process of thermogenesis in which organisms produce heat to maintain their body temperature, the metabolic process that gets disrupted by thermogenesis is choice c the electron transport chain and oxidative phosphorylation. See you in the next video.

Mammals can regulate their body heat through a process called thermogenesis. What part of metabolism changes to allow for the production of heat?

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Key Concepts

Thermogenesis

Metabolism

Energy Expenditure