What does atp look like

There are times when the cell needs even more energy, and it splits off another phosphate, so it goes from ADP, adenoside di-phosphate, to AMP, adenosine mono-phosphate. Think of the others as different brands of rechargable batteries that do the same job. What about oxygen? Why do we need that? What happens if you put a glass over a candle? You starve the fire of oxygen, and the flame flickers out. If a metabolic reaction is aerobic, it requires oxygen.

Buy why? Here's an analogy. Think about lighting a campfire. What do you need? You need fuel the wood , you need heat it's harder to light a fire when it's cold , and you need oxygen because another word for burning is " oxidizing " and, as you might guess, it can only occur in the presence of oxygen. Oxidizing something causes it to lose electrons, which means that energy the electrons is released when you oxidize, or burn, a fuel. Other versions of this page are: a Chime version and a JMol version.

All living things, plants and animals, require a continual supply of energy in order to function. The energy is used for all the processes which keep the organism alive. Some of these processes occur continually, such as the metabolism of foods, the synthesis of large, biologically important molecules, e. Other processes occur only at certain times, such as muscle contraction and other cellular movements.

Animals obtain their energy by oxidation of foods, plants do so by trapping the sunlight using chlorophyll. However, before the energy can be used, it is first transformed into a form which the organism can handle easily. This special carrier of energy is the molecule adenosine triphosphate , or ATP. The ATP molecule is composed of three components.

At the centre is a sugar molecule, ribose the same sugar that forms the basis of RNA. Attached to one side of this is a base a group consisting of linked rings of carbon and nitrogen atoms ; in this case the base is adenine. The other side of the sugar is attached to a string of phosphate groups.

These phosphates are the key to the activity of ATP. ATP works by losing the endmost phosphate group when instructed to do so by an enzyme. This reaction releases a lot of energy, which the organism can then use to build proteins, contact muscles, etc. The reaction product is adenosine diphosphate ADP , and the phosphate group either ends up as orthophosphate HPO 4 or attached to another molecule e.