ATP, Cell Respiration, and Energy!!! Help Needed?

Question

Help please?¿?!i!
Please try to keep it rather simple, I'm only in 9th grade!

1. How does molecular oxygen function in aerobic respiration? What would happen to an aerobic organism, such as a tree living in a floodplain, if the oxygen supply was cut off for a prolonged period of time during the flood?

2. If you wanted your body to make some ATP energy, would you eat a sugar cookie, some high-protein lentils, or a hamburger cooked in vegetable oil? Why?

These are the only two questions i could not find in my text book or anywhere online, and my teacher said it wasn't exactly in our textbook and that we had to do research

Answer 1

1. Oxygen works at the very, very end of aerobic respiration. When the electrons reach the end of the electron transport chain, something has to pick them up and take them away so the process will continue. Oxygen picks up these electrons and also the H+ that have passed through the process. Together, they make molecules of water.

I always think that makes oxygen kind of like the garbage truck. If the garbage truck doesn't come and carry off the trash, then the trash will build up and everything will come to a halt. If oxygen doesn't gather up the electrons and hydrogen ions at the end of the electron transport chain, those will build up and all of aerobic respiration will come to a halt -- clear back to the end of glycolysis. Then fermentation has to take over.

2. To get ATP fast, eat the sugar cookie. The other foods have energy molecules in them, but the molecules will have to be processed more in the body before they are ready to use.

Answer 2

1. I might disagree in your choice of a tree as an aerobic organism. An aerobic organism would be an animal, or an aerobic bacteria, there are also facultative aerobes. But to answer your question, molecular oxygen acts as an electron acceptor in the mitochondria in a process called oxidative phosphorylation which creates ATP molecules from ADP and inorganic phosphate.

2. If you want to make ATP, you would eat a sugar cookie. Although eating high potein lenils would aldso provide ATP, it wouldn't be as direct as sugars. A hamburger cooked in vergetable oil would also provide proteins which could ultimately be converted into ATP, but again not as quickly (directly). This is because the sugars would be metabolized through glycolysis, and the Krebs cycle to make ATP through oxidative phosphorylation.