Ch 12Respiration in Plants — Class 11 Biology, concept-first.

Every living cell needs a steady supply of oxygen to carry out aerobic respiration, and must equally get rid of the carbon dioxide that respiration produces as a waste gas.

Glycolysis is the very first stage of cellular respiration, and it is common to every living cell that respires, whether the pathway that follows it is aerobic or anaerobic.

When oxygen is not available to a respiring cell -- as may happen, for a plant, in waterlogged root tissue, in densely packed germinating seeds, or in fleshy fruit and storage tissue with restricted i…

When oxygen is available, a respiring cell abandons the energetically wasteful route of fermentation and instead sends the pyruvic acid produced by glycolysis into the mitochondria, where it undergoes…

The tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle -- also called the Krebs cycle, after the biochemist Hans Krebs who first worked out its sequence of reactions, or sometimes the citric acid cycle, after its first,…

Glycolysis, the link reaction and the TCA cycle, taken together, generate only a small amount of ATP directly, by substrate-level phosphorylation; what they generate in much greater abundance is a lar…

Bringing together the ATP-equivalent yield of every stage of aerobic respiration -- glycolysis, the oxidative decarboxylation (link reaction) of pyruvic acid, the TCA cycle, and the electron transport…

Respiration is very often introduced, and thought of, purely as a catabolic pathway -- one whose entire purpose is to break down complex organic molecules such as glucose into simpler ones, releasing…

The respiratory quotient (RQ), also called the respiratory ratio, is a simple but informative measurement that allows a physiologist to infer which organic substrate a respiring tissue is actually oxi…

This chapter examined how a plant obtains and uses the oxygen its cells need for aerobic respiration, and how it breaks down glucose to release the chemical energy captured in it as ATP.