84 6.28 Anaerobic Respiration

Conditions without oxygen are referred to as anaerobic. In this case, the pyruvate will be converted to lactate in the cytoplasm of the cell as shown below.

What happens if oxygen isn’t available to serve as the final electron acceptor? As shown in the following video, the ETC becomes backed up with electrons and can’t accept them from NADH and FADH2.

This leads to a problem in glycolysis because NAD is needed to accept electrons, as shown below. Without the electron transport chain functioning, all NAD has been reduced to NADH and glycolysis cannot continue to produce ATP from glucose.

Thus, there is a workaround to regenerate NAD by converting pyruvate (pyruvic acid) to lactate (lactic acid) as shown below.

However, anaerobic respiration only produces 2 ATP per molecule of glucose, compared to 32 ATP for aerobic respiration. The biggest producer of lactate is the muscle. Through what is known as the Cori cycle, lactate produced in the muscle can be sent to the liver. In the liver, through a process known as gluconeogenesis, glucose can be regenerated and sent back to the muscle to be used again for anaerobic respiration forming a cycle as shown below.

It is worth noting that the Cori cycle also functions during times of limited glucose (like fasting) to spare glucose by not completely oxidizing it.

References & Links

1. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondria#/media/File:Animal_mitochondrion_diagram_en_(edit).svg

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CellRespiration.svg

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyruvic_acid#/media/File:Pyruvic-acid-2D-skeletal.png

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid#/media/File:Lactic-acid-skeletal.svg

5. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CoriCycle-noLang.svg#/media/File:CoriCycle-eng.svg

Video

What happens when your run out of oxygen? – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StXlo1W3Gvg