My favorite books on bioenergetics or how life makes a living

A comprehensive and very readable biography of oxygen, its scientific study, and its role in the history of life on Earth. 

The “big picture” view is grounded in numerous anecdotes of individual scientists’ work. The relevant scientific history blends nicely with the history of life. Throughout, we see oxygen generated by oxygenic photosynthesis, consumed by oxidative phosphorylation, with leftovers drifting up into the atmosphere to eventually produce the planet that supports human civilization and much else besides.

Oxygen is critical to life as we know it, yet for much of the history of life oxygen was scarce to non-existent, and this continues to be the case in some modern environments. 

While anaerobiosis is only a minor inconvenience to many microorganisms, what about complex multicellular organisms such as animals (aka metazoans)? Beginning with aspects of the physical chemistry of oxygen, this volume fills in the fairly stereotypical ways that animals cope with oxygen limitation, both temporally and spatially. 

Notably, many animals have a much more sophisticated anaerobic metabolism than human beings.

So, how is oxygen involved in bioenergetics? Perhaps remarkably, the modern view of bioenergetics only recently emerged in the closing decades of the 20th century. 

As related in this volume, the chemiosmotic hypothesis of Peter Mitchell roiled the field of bioenergetics and led to the nearly two-decade “oxphos wars.” In the end, the chemiosmotic hypothesis was triumphant, and bioenergetics became the study of building and harnessing trans-membrane ion gradients. 

In this context, oxygen takes its place as a terminal electron acceptor, which by facilitating electron flow through the electron transport chain, helps to build the trans-membrane proton gradient. There are, of course, quite a few other actual or potential terminal electron acceptors, and there is much more in this volume about how organisms move electrons around to convert energy.

Lest we forget, however, oxygen was “missing in action” for most of the history of life and can be scarce in some habitats even today. Hence, even complex eukaryotes, which might usually depend on oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor, must have a “plan B.” 

Building on the earlier work by Bryant (1991) and others, this volume outlines in considerable detail how eukaryotes manage their energetics without oxygen. Some of these mechanisms involve building trans-membrane proton gradients in mitochondria anaerobically. This is not something that human cells can do.  Rather, our cells rely on lactate formation when anaerobic. 

Indeed, some human cancers exhibit the so-called Warburg effect—aerobic glycolysis, diminished oxygen consumption, and lactate secretion. What would this effect look like in some of these organisms that use mitochondria anaerobically?

Study of the Warburg effect has stimulated broader interest in how metabolism might regulate cellular and organismal biology. 

This volume gives voice to this nascent field. The Krebs or tricarboxylic acid cycle—the “one ring to rule them all”—produces reduced co-enzymes that are then oxidized by the electron transport chain to produce the trans-membrane proton gradient. The Krebs cycle also produces numerous precursors for biosynthesis. It can thus signal the metabolic state of the cell, switching numerous genes on or off. 

Intermediary metabolism, long ignored by many biologists, may thus be the key to much of what cells and organisms are and what they do.