In: Biology
The H+/ATP ratio is variable between ATP synthase isolated from different organisms. Explain the difference and provide a possible explanation for why the reaction stoichiometry is not conserved across species.
The H+/ATP ratio is variable between ATP synthase isolated from different organism. For example in case of yeast mitochandria it is 2.9 and spinch chloroplast it is 3.9. This ratio is kept different during the course of evolution by the structural difference in ATP synthase complex. There is cental shaft that connects the tripartite catalytic head and a membrane embeded c-oligomer. It is assumed that this ratio should correlate with the ratio of no. of proton-binding c-oligomer. Many experiments of structural data demonstrated that the composition of c-oligomer varies in different organism. It has also been found that beta subunit is same in all fo-f1 particles, however, c- subunit varies between 8 to 25 giving a H+/ATP ratio of beteen 2.7 to 5.0
This stoichiometry has not been kept conserved during the course of evolution due to fact that different energy (ATP) requirement across different species. The species with a high energy requirement less no of H+ are required to generate ATP molecules through ATP synthase complex giving low H+/ATP ration and vice versa