But now we are faced with a strange situation: the Krebs chakra simultaneously creates and destroys, giving it a yin and yang that (I would argue) still decide how our genes work, Including our risks of diseases. Genes arose out of this metabolic vortex. The Krebs cycle is the engine of life, which turns gases into living things. What is new is that the Krebs cycle and subsequent reactions can occur spontaneously. Life makes everything it needs from these molecules – amino acids for making proteins, lipids for membranes, and nucleotides for the informational molecules DNA and RNA. They use energy from the environment to convert gases – carbon dioxide and hydrogen – into key building blocks of life, at the heart of metabolism.

The cycle of reactions that take CO2 and hydrogen out of food to generate energy may be working in reverse in some of the most ancient bacteria. This charge is as intense as a lightning bolt-if you shrink yourself to the size of a molecule, you’ll feel an electric charge of 30 million volts per meter! The energy released is used to power an electric charge on membranes deep within our cells. Then we take the carbon out as CO2, and we burn the hydrogen into oxygen. These are the intermediates that make up the Krebs cycle. In short, when we burn fuels such as glucose in cell respiration, we first break them down into simpler molecules made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Most of us know the Krebs cycle as the cycle of biochemical reactions associated with energy production in cells. It may sound like a textbook biochemistry loaded from decades ago, but it holds the mystery of what brings a planet to life and ends our own life. In the beginning there was the Krebs cycle.Īt the heart of life is a wonderful, conflicting blissful cycle of reactions called the Krebs cycle.

He has won many awards for his science writings.īelow, Nick shares 5 key insights from his new book, Transformers: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, Listen to the audio version in the Next Big Idea app – read by Nick himself. Nick Lane is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London.

Transformers nick lane