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[1] [2] The word hydrophobic literally means "water-fearing", and it describes the segregation of water and nonpolar substances, which maximizes the entropy of water and minimizes the area of contact between water and nonpolar molecules. In terms of thermodynamics, the hydrophobic effect is the free energy change of water surrounding a solute. [3]
In chemical thermodynamics, an endergonic reaction (from Greek ἔνδον (endon) 'within' and ἔργον (ergon) 'work'; also called a heat absorbing nonspontaneous reaction or an unfavorable reaction) is a chemical reaction in which the standard change in free energy is positive, and an additional driving force is needed to perform this ...
Anabolism usually involves reduction and decreases entropy, making it unfavorable without energy input. [6] The starting materials, called the precursor molecules, are joined using the chemical energy made available from hydrolyzing ATP, reducing the cofactors NAD +, NADP +, and FAD, or performing other favorable side reactions. [7]
Limited synthesis of adenosine triphosphate impairs many cellular transport mechanisms that utilize ATP to drive energetically unfavorable processes that transport ions and molecules across the cellular membrane. For example, the membrane potential of the cell is maintained by the sodium-potassium ATPase pump. Failure of the pump results in ...
A reaction with ∆H°<0 is called exothermic reaction while one with ∆H°>0 is endothermic. Figure 8: Reaction Coordinate Diagrams showing favorable or unfavorable and slow or fast reactions [7] The relative stability of reactant and product does not define the feasibility of any reaction all by itself.
In water, the hydrophobic effect is the driving force for micelle formation, despite the fact that assembling surfactant molecules is unfavorable in terms of both enthalpy and entropy of the system. At very low concentrations of the surfactant, only monomers are present in solution.
Though ATP-powered pumps also move molecules in an energetically unfavorable direction and undergo conformational changes to do so, they fall under a different category of membrane proteins because they couple the energy derived from ATP hydrolysis to transport their respective ions. These ion pumps are very selective, consisting of a double ...
The principle that biological macromolecules catalyze a thermodynamically unfavorable reaction if and only if a thermodynamically favorable reaction occurs simultaneously, underlies all known forms of life. The transfer of electrons from a donor molecule to an acceptor molecule can be spatially separated into a series of intermediate redox ...