Aerobic Respiration

Aerobic respiration is respiration that proceeds only in the presence of oxygen, and it completely oxidises food materials -- carbohydrates, fats and proteins -- all the way down to carbon dioxide and water, releasing the maximum possible amount of energy from the substrate in the process. It is a genuinely complex, multi-step pathway, completed across four major stages that occur in sequence: (1) glycolysis, which splits glucose into pyruvic acid in the cytoplasm; (2) pyruvate oxidation or the link reaction, which converts pyruvic acid into acetyl coenzyme-A inside the mitochondrial matrix; (3) the Krebs cycle (TCA cycle), which oxidises acetyl coenzyme-A all the way to carbon dioxide and water in the mitochondrial matrix; and (4) the electron transport chain (terminal oxidation), which uses the reduced coenzymes generated in the earlier …