Question

In the process of anaerobic respiration _______ is a 6 carbon compound which gets converted into _______ carbon compound called the lactic acid.

Answer 1

Hint: Certain microbes are present in environments which respire anaerobically, in anaerobic respiration microorganism do not require Oxygen to convert the glucose into energy yielding molecules. In anaerobic respiration, oxygen is not the final electron acceptor.

Complete answer:
In anaerobic respiration, microbes convert the 6 carbon compound glucose converted into 3 carbon compounds called lactic acid, many bacteria and archaea groups perform the anaerobic respiration. Most of the living organisms are aerobic in nature because they utilize oxygen for the oxidation of glucose and convert into the pyruvate and pyruvic acid, which are further converted into carbon dioxide and water molecules.

Not only in some bacteria or archaea, anaerobic respiration found but also occur in human muscle tissue, during intensive exercise muscle tissue consume oxygen at faster rate to perform activity, which decrease the level of oxygen in muscle, which lead to anaerobic respiration of store energy molecule, that lead to accumulation of lactic acid in muscle that cause muscle pain.

In aerobic respiration the electrons are shuttled to an ETC, and oxygen is the final electron acceptor. In case of anaerobic respiration, anaerobes use less- oxidizing substances like nitrate, fumarate, sulphate or in some cases sulphur, these molecules have smaller reduction potential as compared to oxygen that mean less energy is released. That’s why anaerobic respiration is less efficient than aerobic respiration.

Note: Apart from aerobic and anaerobic respiration, fermentation is also an energy yielding process. In fermentation, electrochemical gradient is not utilized but it uses substrate level phosphorylation to obtain ATP. NAD is an electron acceptor molecule that is regenerated from NADH, which is formed in the oxidative phase of the fermentation pathway.