• Question: Do you think that in the future it will be possible to create cells that can create their own energy?

    Asked by nico to Caroline on 11 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Caroline Dalton

      Caroline Dalton answered on 11 Jun 2012:

      Amazingly cells already do create their own energy! All of the energy the cell needs to grow and survive is made inside the cell. Mostly this happens in mitochondria which are like little batteries inside the cell. The cell takes up nutrients from its environment and the mitochondria use these to make something called ATP which is the form of energy which the cell uses. The ATP then leaves the mitochondria and is used throughout the cell for lots of important things like growth, movement and division. The ATP gets broken down when it is used and so the mitochondria need to keep making more of it for the cell to survive.

Comments

  • Photo: Artem

    Artem commented on :

    Living systems feed off of the ‘free energy’ (not free in the conventional sense, unfortunately – there’s still a price for it) found within the chemicals they consume. Plants and certain bacteria also harness the energy of photons (light) to generate energy-rich chemicals (and in the process make the world a livable place for the rest of us), but they still have to consume and transform matter in order to build more of themselves and to maintain their cells in good repair.

    Energy does not get created out of nothing (at least in classical physics) and therefore no matter what sort of engineered cells we could think of, they would still have to get their energy (and matter, after all they would have to grow somehow) from something. A curious and highly hypothetical kind of cell would be one that is able to interconvert energy and matter – that’s something that we cannot even really speculate about at this point.