Single covalent carbon-carbon bonds have a bond energy of 83 kcal/mol while visible light from the sun has 40–70 kcal of energy per mole of photons. Why is this property of carbon-carbon bonds important for life on earth?
Based on this observation, how could the degradation of the earth's atmosphere and an increase in high-energy ultraviolet radiation affect life on earth?
What will be an ideal response?
Answer: The fact that carbon-carbon bonds have a high bond energy indicates that the bonds are quite stable and do not easily break apart. The stability of carbon-carbon bonds provides relatively stable molecules in biological systems that do not degrade at temperatures typically found on earth. The fact that visible light waves from the sun contain less energy than what is required to break a carbon-carbon bond indicates that carbon-carbon bonds will not degrade when exposed to visible light. If the earth's atmosphere loses its ability to absorb or reflect ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which contains more energy than visible light, biological systems will be damaged, as UV radiation will damage critical biomolecules in living organisms on the surface of the earth.
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Post-translational regulation of an enzyme's activity, such as glutamine synthetase, can be finely controlled at varied levels due to
A) the varied strengths metabolite-regulating compounds can have with the enzyme such as hydrogen bonding, covalent bonding, and van der Waals attractions. B) having multiple independently functional subunits. C) the structural strength enzymes have once properly folded compared to short-lived and easily degradable transcripts during translational regulation. D) weak chemical modifications of the enzyme rather than harsh protein-protein or protein-DNA interactions.
Allosteric inhibitors are often ____
a. substrates of the reactions they regulate b. products of the reactions that they regulate c. charged amino acids in the active site d. large, complex organic molecules e. competitive inhibitors
As the size of a population approaches the carrying capacity
A. the number of births and deaths are about equal. B. the population is in the lag phase. C. density-dependent limiting factors are not important. D. the biomass decreases.
In the reaction glucose + oxygen ? carbon dioxide + heat, the:
A) products have the same amount of potential energy as the reactants. B) entropy has decreased. C) products have more potential energy than the reactants. D) products have less potential energy than the reactants.