Oxidative Phosphorylation at the fin de siècle
Matti Saraste
Mitochondria produce most of the energy in animal cells
by a process called oxidative phosphorylation. Electrons
are passed along a series of respiratory enzyme complexes located in
the inner mitochondrial membrane, and the energy released by this electron transfer is used to pump protons across the membrane. The
resultant electrochemical gradient enables another complex, adenosine
5'-triphosphate (ATP) synthase, to synthesize the energy carrier ATP.
Important new mechanistic insights into oxidative phosphorylation have emerged from recent three-dimensional
structural analyses of ATP synthase and two of the respiratory enzyme
complexes, cytochrome bc1 and cytochrome c oxidase. This
work, and new enzymological studies of ATP synthase's unusual
catalytic mechanism, are reviewed here.
The author is at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory,
Meyerhofstrasse 1, Postfach 102209, D-69012, Heidelberg, Germany.
E-mail Saraste{at}EMBL-Heidelberg.de
