Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Thermogenesis
Summary
Thermogenesis is the process of heat production in organisms. It occurs in all warm-blooded animals, and also in a few species of thermogenic plants such as the Eastern skunk cabbage, the Voodoo lily (Sauromatum venosum), and the giant water lilies of the genus Victoria. The lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe, Arceuthobium americanum, disperses its seeds explosively through thermogenesis.
Depending on whether or not they are initiated through locomotion and intentional movement of the muscles, thermogenic processes can be classified as one of the following:
Exercise-associated thermogenesis (EAT)
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), energy expended for everything that is not sleeping, eating or sports-like exercise.
Diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT)
One method to raise temperature is through shivering. It produces heat because the conversion of the chemical energy of ATP into kinetic energy causes almost all of the energy to show up as heat. Shivering is the process by which the body temperature of hibernating mammals (such as some bats and ground squirrels) is raised as these animals emerge from hibernation.
Non-shivering thermogenesis occurs in brown adipose tissue (brown fat) that is present in almost all eutherians (swine being the only exception currently known). Brown adipose tissue has a unique uncoupling protein (thermogenin, also known as uncoupling protein 1) that allows the uncoupling of protons (H+) moving down their mitochondrial gradient from the synthesis of ATP, thus allowing the energy to be dissipated as heat. The atomic structure of human uncoupling protein 1 UCP1 has been solved by cryogenic-electron microscopy. The structure has the typical fold of a member of the SLC25 family. UCP1 is locked in a cytoplasmic-open state by guanosine triphosphate in a pH-dependent manner, preventing proton leak.
In this process, substances such as free fatty acids (derived from triacylglycerols) remove purine (ADP, GDP and others) inhibition of thermogenin, which causes an influx of H+ into the matrix of the mitochondrion and bypasses the ATP synthase channel.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.