ABSTRACT
Paradigms, like tides, ebb and ood. e original proposal that bioenergetic complexes are organized in solid-like supercomplexes with restricted diusion of redox shuttles to ensure ecient electron transfer was clearly ahead of its time (Keilin and Hartree, 1947). e overwhelming power of reductionist biology to identify and characterize individual functional elements, and the inability of contemporary structural biology methods to characterize targets that are dynamic and heterogeneous in space and time, played against that idea. ose factors established the opportunity for the emergence of the model of random collision of the complexes (Gupte et al., 1984), based on the uid mosaic model for the organization of biological membranes (Nicolson, 2014). ese seemingly opposing views were since reconciled in the plasticity model (Acín-Pérez and Enriquez, 2014). is model appeared following the systems biology revolution supported by methodological and technological developments at the level of gentle conditions for the purication of membrane proteins and advanced high-resolution imaging. In the frame of the plasticity model, the solid and the uid models represent extreme manifestations of a dynamic network of multiple association arrangements of the various bioenergetic complexes displaying variable stoichiometry.
