ABSTRACT
The muscleman of the cell consists of protein complexes and protein networks enveloped by or embedded into bioenergetic membranes. Besides being the permeability barriers, membranes perform many other vital functions, including active transport, signaling, and energy transduction. Essential for bioenergetics are primary and secondary proton pumps. Their function is the conversion of free energy packages from the cell environment first into the transmembrane electric field, and then into the biologically convenient currency of ATP molecules. Mitchell’s revolution (the chemiosmotic theory) implied that replication is only the side reaction when the cell’s overall bioenergetics is considered. Since bioenergetic transformations mostly take place within bioenergetic membranes, evolutionary biologists and life-origin researchers appreciated the reasons why such membranes are compartmentalized in eukaryotic cells to produce a thousand times higher surface than in prokaryotic cells. By using proton circuits, all cells developed the almost perfect balance between metabolic entropy increase and efficient entropy export to the rest of the universe. Any blockage to entropy export (a bridge to the universe) converts live cells into dead cells.
