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Metabolism
The way in which biological cells convert food into energy stored in molecules such as ATP is shared by almost all living things - but it is not clear whether the existing chemical pathways have been selected by evolution as being optimal, or are instead "accidents" which happened to occur in a very early form of life and have been with us ever since.
In recent work, my student Steve Court, myself and our colleague Bartek Waclaw have used an exhaustive in silico search algorithm to investigate whether the pathways used by nature to metabolise sugars are the only ones that are allowed by the rules of biochemistry, or whether alternatives exist. Our results have shown that although many alternative pathways exist, the real pathway (glycolysis) is the most effective method to produce ATP from glucose because it has the optimal flux. This suggests that glycolysis may have been selected by biological evolution to optimise the ATP flux.
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