Talk:Zymase

message: I LOV EYOU  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.157.10.149 (talk) 17:44, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: This article is at least 22% bogus. Yeast does ethanol fermentation much the same way that human cells do lactic acid fermentation. It occurs via the electron transport chain that is membrane-bound in mitochondria, and it requires the mitochondria (and the cell) to be intact, not crushed. Bacteria do something different, I never understood it quite as well.
The mitochondria must be intact to separate the high pH and low pH aqueous chambers, because the proton gradient is critically important. Also, the components of the electron transport chain are membrane-bound in yeast and humans, and they need to be physically adjacent because electrons flow between them.
I just, I can't even.
At the end of the electron transport chain, under normal (aerobic) circumstances, electrons from Complex IV (and I just looked that up on Wikipedia, but it sounds correct) join with protons that are freely available in aqueous solution and oxygen (O2), to produce water (H2O), and the oxygen atoms are reduced in water, H2O, where the oxygen atoms now have an oxidation state of -2 instead of 0.
I feel like I have a mix of brain damage and also renewed brain clarity. And the brain damage was mostly provoked by this article, but also the fact that this stuff is hard to explain and this article has a lot of problems that have lured me into confused thinking. And redox reactions are super complicated, because there is oxidation state and formal charge, and then "oxidized" can mean "adding oxygen" or "increasing oxidation state". And "reduced" can mean "simplified" or "adding hydrogen / saturating" and also "decreasing (reducing) oxidation state" and also both of them refer to the movement of electrons in a direction.
Anyhow, O2 is the electron acceptor or "oxidizing agent" in aerobic respiration.
If O2 is not available, other electron acceptors are used. Pyruvate itself can be used, this creates lactic acid. This occurs in human muscles during sprinting.
In the yeast used to create ethanol, acetaldehyde is used as an electron acceptor. It is somewhat less amenable to this reaction, because the alpha-keto carboxylic acid structure in pyruvate makes the carbonyl group especially reactive. However, the existence of beer shows that it can be done. Once again, two protons and two electrons are added to a carbonyl group to create an alcohol group. Ethanol fermentation in yeast and lactic acid fermentation in humans are quite similar.
Lactobacilis-and-yeast food products are different. Because the world is complicated.
If you could make ethanol out of sugar in this way - well, we just don't live in that world. The manufacture of E85 biofuel would possibly be different, it would depend on whether this non-existent enzyme coctail was cheaper than live yeast.
I may delete this later, I am curious what my IP address is.
I am editing Talk:Zymase and it is Monday, March 8th. I'm not logged in because life is hard. I am not sure what my IP address is, several websites have apparently been storing "my IP address" in BROWSER COOKIES, I figured that out at 10:00 hours sharp (UTC) when opening a Firefox Private Browsing window CHANGED my apparent IP address. 24.147.245.244 (talk) 10:26, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is &gte;22% bogus