Transformer

By Nick Lane,

Book cover of Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

Book description

What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end?

For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Transformer as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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…

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