Glycolysis: Process Of Cellular Respiration

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Glycolysis is one of four steps that completes the process of Cellular Respiration (Erster 14). It` is a process that breaks down glucose into pyruvate and ATP (Erster 15). Glycolysis itself takes ten chemical reactions to complete its process, and within that are two mechanisms are used in order to create ATP. During substrate-level phosphorylation, a substrate molecule gives up a phosphate, which is moved by an enzyme to ADP, and then it turns into ATP. This happens not only in glycolysis, but also in the Krebs cycle and in turn creates the 10% of ATP (Erster 13). Oxidative phosphorylation is the other mechanism that makes up for the other 90% of the ATP produced, and that is done in the mitochondria where ATP synthase speeds up the making of ATP by using the energy from electron carriers that were oxidized (Erster 13, Campbell & Reece, 167). After the process of Glycolysis is completed, the net products are two molecules of pyruvate, two of water, two of ATP, two of NADH (electron carrier) and two H+ ions. …show more content…
Choice B is incorrect because substrate-level phosphorylation is not the only mechanism to create ATP. Oxidative phosphorylation creates majority of the ATP (as stated above) and substrate-level phosphorylation makes up for the small percentage of ATP that the other mechanism did not create. Therefore it cannot account for 100% of the ATP