What is it about?
This paper shows that biological membranes dramatically alter their permeability properties and centrifugation that too with a negative temperature coefficient (it cannot be diffusion but a structural change in the membrane due to decreased entropy). In one breath dis paper disproves the assumptions deDuve on centrifugation theory and renders the chemiosmotic hypothesis of Peter Mitchell untenable as also most transport studies.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Equilibration of sucrose across membranes at low gravitational fields is thermodynamically unacceptable showing that our views on the interpretation of thermodynamics, largely based on enthalpy are wrong. This raised the questions :i. are the membranes as inert as they are viewed to be and ii.can othe energy transactions do the same to membranes. The answer was positively yes as shown by us over two to three decades.
Perspectives
Many lines of work have come out of our lab showing that this entropy-dominated behaviour in biology is common to membranes, micelles and even proteins. The discomfort that this led to in arriving at usual energy based models meant that this has been ignored for its universal appliacability despite many other publications from our lab.
Prof. vetury sitaramam
Savitribai Phule Pune University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Gravitational field enhances permeability of biological membranes to sucrose: an experimental refutation of sucrose-space hypothesis., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 1981, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.78.6.3441.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
