ABSTRACT
The history of membrane-linked bioenergetics parallels the history of the biochemistry of intermediary metabolism. The electron-transfer complexes reside in the inner membrane of the mitochondria. The outer mitochondrial membrane is considered a sieve that only retains macromolecules. The paradigm for a biological membrane is a lipid bilayer forming a two-dimensional sea in which membrane proteins float. T. Higuti and colleagues propose that the inhibitors act by interacting with defined membrane proteins called chargerins that are involved in the proton pumping action of the electron transfer complexes and of the Adenosine triphosphate synthase. E. C. Slater and colleagues generalized the collisional mechanism of electron transfer into what one may call the collisional model of free-energy transduction. For coupling-unit hypotheses of mitochondrial free-energy transduction, this also seems a possibility. The authors conclude with effects on the kinetics and thermodynamics of oxidative phosphorylation, expected from the complex structure of the mitchondrion, are indeed observed.
