Cellular respiration is one of the most basic processes without which life on Earth wouldn't have been possible. The energy that every organism requires to survive is derived through respiration process at the cellular level. This article will give you a brief overview of respiration process at cellular level and summarize it with the cellular respiration formula.

What is Cellular respiration?

Before we talk about cellular respiration formula, let us know something more about this process and why is it one of the most important metabolic processes. Cellular respiration is a combined set of metabolic reactions that occur in every cell, that converts biochemical energy derived from food into the energy currency of the body, which are ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) molecules, along with the release of waste products.

The nutrients derived from food like glucose, are the raw materials of cellular respiration. Carbohydrates or sugars like glucose are processed at a cellular level to create energy to store ATP molecules. When ATP molecules get converted to ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate), it releases energy. All the bodily functions are made possible due to ATP molecule conversion. Hence, they are referred as energy currency of the body. To summarize, cellular respiration is the collection of all metabolic processes that breakdown carbohydrates to create Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) molecules.

Formula For Cellular Respiration

The story of cellular respiration is all about how a cell acquires ATP molecules. Every biological or metabolic process like cellular respiration is very complicated and involves many reactants and products. In fact, all biological processes resemble industrial assembly lines as every one of them is a connected chain of smaller cycles. Instead of going into the explicit details of the cellular respiration equation, in this article I analyze it as simply as possible.

Let us look at this process in the simplest possible way through a simple cellular respiration formula. This formula is simplified in the sense, that we only talk about what are the raw materials or reactants for the cellular respiratory process and what are the products. We do not go into the deep details of the process itself. Here is the cellular respiration formula that summarizes the whole process in short:

C6H12O6 + 6O2 --> 6CO2 + 6H2O + Energy (36 or 38 ATP molecules)

In this process the reactants are glucose (C6H12O6) and oxygen (O2), while the products are carbon dioxide (CO2) and energy in the form of 36 or 38 ATP molecules. The small arrow in between is a substitute for a lot of complex reactions that happen at the cellular level. Still, I will summarize what happens with the main reactants in the above cellular respiration formula and give you the bare outlines.

There are three steps in which aerobic cellular respiration occurs in cells. They are:

* Glycolysis: The process of glycolysis takes place in the cytosol of the cell. The products of glycolysis are 3 pyruvate molecules, 2 ATP and 2 NADH (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide) molecules.

* Krebs Cycle: Next is the Krebs cycle or citric acid cycle, which occurs in the cellular mitochondria. In this process, the pyruvate molecules are acted upon and ATP molecules are released
   
* Electron Transport Chain: This is the last stage of respiration, where the maximum number of ATP molecules are created.

All these metabolic processes operate through enzymes in such a way, that the energy stored within a glucose molecule is released gradually and ATP are processed.

Oxidation is removal of electrons, while reduction is gaining of electrons. In the whole process of cellular respiration, what you need to remember is that glucose gets oxidized while oxygen gets reduced. Glucose is a high energy molecule while carbon dioxide and water molecules are comparatively low energy molecules. So, through the cellular respiration process, energy is released which is used to synthesize ATP molecules. The 36 or 38 ATP molecules produced constitute about 39% of energy contained in the glucose molecule. So, we could say that the efficiency of the cellular respiration process is 39%.

Tags:Oxidation,ATP molecules,Glycolysis,Krebs Cycle,Transport Chain.