In my latest posts I’ve been talking about photosynthesis and the way the energy of light is converted into electrons. Today I’m talking about a related concept of all water-based (or aqueous) reactions.
Most of the synthetic organic chemistry that we do industrially uses solvents, while the reactions in living organisms takes place in water. What a solvent does is that it separates a single molecule from its supramolecular shell and allows reactions to occur between individual molecules. However, this is not what happens in living organisms. Humans, animals, plants or micro-organisms don’t (usually) have solvents inside to make chemical reactions take place.
So, if the molecules aren’t dissolved in living organisms, how can they react? This is not at all a trivial question. Enzymes are involved in the transport of molecules, but at least to my understanding they don’t move themselves. If without the presence of solvents, molecules are stuck in supramolecular loops, what appears to take place in cells is that all the reactions that seem to be separate steps are in fact more like gears in mechanism timed by a belt of interconnected molecules. But when the gear is an enzyme that catalyzes a reaction, the structure of the timing belt changes from one gear to another. Just like the gears in bikes, clocks and internal combustion engines require a source of energy to turn, so does the turning of enzymatic gears. This energy is in the form of ATP. However, as far as I see it, the ATP molecules themselves also form timing belts. It is common knowledge that everything else in cells works in this manner. See the working of DNA copying mechanism in this video at 3:00 and you see the concept of moving ‘belts’.
The idea that the feed of raw materials for the reactions in cells takes place by random movement of the molecules is a bit like assuming that you can load a gun by dropping bullets on a gun and hoping that every once in a while, a bullet finds itself into the gun. For guns, there either must be an ‘intelligent loader’, or an ammunition belt. But then there is the question of what keeps to molecules bound together in the belt, if there are no chemical bonds keeping them in place?
Here we get to the concept of supramolecular shells and the supramolecular coupling of adjacent orbital. While this probably sounds quite confusing, it really isn’t. It is just the difference between the Schrödinger interpretation of the probabilistic electron and the classical string interpretation of the electron (or the molecular orbital to be more precise). Based on the concept of the molecular orbital being a string, this necessitates there to be a supramolecular orbital as well. And if/when there is a supramolecular orbital, this leads to neighboring molecules linking to chains. However, these chains can either be strong or weak, depending on the properties of the atoms involved in the link. Many of these bonds are well known, such as the hydrogen bond, metallic bond, ionic bond, or even halogen bond. However, where chemistry has gone astray is assuming that these bonds aren’t a universal property of all atom-atom interactions between molecules. It’s not that it isn’t known that there are other types of bonding present than the known atom-atom bonds. However these interactions are called things like van der Waals force, or the hydrophobic effect. The problem is that if/when these effects are aggregated along a whole supramolecular shell and between neighboring supramolecular shells, it is impossible to assign the interaction to a single bond. And suddenly this aggregate effect gets a different name and it’s no longer a similar bond to the rest.
So, back to the timing belts. What’s driving them? Do the molecules in the belt drive this movement? While I cannot categorically rule out some effect of these molecules, the primary driving force is temperature. And besides hydrothermal vents in the ocean, most life relies on the power of the sun for the heat. In my previous post and in my manuscript (currently waiting for an editor) I showed that water is present as Waterman clusters (polyhedra) where each supramolecular shell of water rotates by thermal energy. It appears that the ‘cellular engine’ runs most smoothly at 37 °C, but it won’t stop until water freezes. My interpretation is that at the temperature of 37 °C, each of the supramolecular shells of water are connected to another with an interstitial supramolecular shell that rotates around two larger shells. If my interpretation of dynamic light scattering data is correct, the diameter of this ‘belt’ is roughly 5200 nm. I see this indirectly in our LignoSphere products, but if you didn’t know what to look for, you might miss the clues.
But how does this ‘water-engine’ make the timing belts of sugars, ADP/ATP and so forth in motion? The short answer is: I don’t know. But now that we know what to look for, we can figure out experimental setups to look for these belts.
What I have quite a strong hunch on is that random movement is confined to solvent-based reaction, where you have external ‘intelligent designer’ in the form of a chemist/engineer. Actual biological systems are coordinated by organisms taking advantage of ‘water-engines’. Of course, there can be some randomness involved, but not nearly to the extent that is assumed when the quantized nature of matter is not appreciated.
This timing belt concept raises an interesting question of waste. Which timing belts are permanent and which ones aren’t? It seems that all of the molecules that aren’t actively consumed by the cell are permanent, whereas the ones consumed, leading to waste (carbon dioxide, urine, feces etc.) are a bit more complex. I won’t discuss about my ideas of the transfer of molecules in and out of cells in this post, as I don’t yet have a good enough idea of what’s going on.
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