Cellular Respiration and Energy Transfer: Overview And Objectives

When you exercise vigorously or hold your breath, you can sense your body's urgent need for oxygen.

Have you ever wondered why your body requires a continuous supply of oxygen?

Oxygen is delivered from your lungs to the bloodstream and from there to each cell of your body.

Your cells need oxygen to carry out cellular respiration, the process that extracts usable energy from the food you eat.

Cellular respiration affects every level of organization in the body.

Organism – An organism, such as a human, obtains its energy through cellular respiration.

Organ system – The respiratory system gets the oxygen needed for cellular respiration.

Organ – The lung is the major organ of the respiratory system.

Tissue – Lung tissues are made of groups of cells.

Cell – Cells contain between 1 & 100,000 mitochondria… more mitochondria = more active cell.

Organelle – The mitochondrion is the organelle of cellular respiration.

Upon completion of this topic, you will be able to:

Correctly use the terms entropy, enzyme, substrate, activation energy, oxidation, reduction, glycolysis, Krebs cycle, electron transport system, and fermentation.

Describe the first two laws of thermodynamics.

Explain how an enzyme speeds up a chemical reaction.

Describe redox (reduction-oxidation) reactions and relate them to cellular respiration.

Describe the three major stages of cellular respiration.

Explain how the need for oxygen is related to the generation of ATP.

D istinguish between aerobic respiration and anaerobic respiration.

Describe the relationship between cellular respiration and photosynthesis.