From Pasteur to Mitchell: a hundred years of bioenergetics

The discovery in 1861 by Louis Pasteur that more yeast is formed aerobically than anaerobically per gram of glucose was the first clue to the difference in efficiency of glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation. During the first half of the 20th century the pathway of glycolysis was untraveled. Individual enzymes and cofactors were isolated and characterized. A reconstituted system of all enzymes and cofactors catalyzed steady-state glycolysis, provided an appropriate ATPase was added. The need for an ATPase, clearly demonstrated in 1945 by Otto Meyerhof, remains an important aspect of glycolysis that has been sorely neglected by textbooks. The coupling of oxidation and phosphorylation and the formation of the high-energy intermediate 1,3-diphosphoglycerate, discovered by Otto Warburg, are the key reactions of glycolysis. A high-energy intermediate formed during this process was identified as a thiolester. Early concepts of the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation based on this model led to some frustrating and confusing years of search for high-energy intermediates. Important contributions from the laboratories of Boyer, Cohn, Chance, Green, Lardy, and Lehninger elucidated the properties of the mitochondrial process. Then Peter Mitchell proposed in 1961, 100 years after the publication by Pasteur, that the "high-energy intermediate" is an electrochemical proton gradient generated by the electron transport chain and utilized by a proton turbine (the mitochondrial ATPase complex) to generate ATP. This concept is now widely accepted. Several problems remain to be solved. How are the protons translocated during electron transport? How many protons per site? What is the mechanism of ATP generation during proton flux via the mitochondrial ATPase?