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Concept
Lactic acid fermentation
Summary
Lactic acid fermentation is a metabolic process by which glucose or other six-carbon sugars (also, disaccharides of six-carbon sugars, e.g. sucrose or lactose) are converted into cellular energy and the metabolite lactate, which is lactic acid in solution. It is an anaerobic fermentation reaction that occurs in some bacteria and animal cells, such as muscle cells.
If oxygen is present in the cell, many organisms will bypass fermentation and undergo cellular respiration; however, facultative anaerobic organisms will both ferment and undergo respiration in the presence of oxygen. Sometimes even when oxygen is present and aerobic metabolism is happening in the mitochondria, if pyruvate is building up faster than it can be metabolized, the fermentation will happen anyway.
Lactate dehydrogenase catalyzes the interconversion of pyruvate and lactate with concomitant interconversion of NADH and NAD+.
In homolactic fermentation, one molecule of glucose is ultimately converted to two molecules of lactic acid. Heterolactic fermentation, in contrast, yields carbon dioxide and ethanol in addition to lactic acid, in a process called the phosphoketolase pathway.
Several chemists discovered during the 19th century some fundamental concepts of the domain of organic chemistry. One of them for example was the French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, who was especially interested in fermentation processes, and he passed this fascination to one of his best students, Justus von Liebig. With a difference of some years, each of them described, together with colleagues, the chemical structure of the lactic acid molecule as we know it today. They had a purely chemical understanding of the fermentation process, which means that you can't see it using a microscope, and that it can only be optimized by chemical catalyzers. In 1857, the French chemist Louis Pasteur first described lactic acid as the product of a microbial fermentation. During this time, he worked at the University of Lille, where a local distillery asked him for advice concerning some fermentation problems.
Official source
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