Energy from blood

L

leopold

Valued Senior Member
since hemoglobin and chlorophyll are similar in structure could hemoglobin be used as a power source. yeah i know it's a whacko idea but intrigueing nonetheless
a bio-mechanical suit, that sounds familiar
 
to power a spacecraft in deep space
solar panels are useless
nuclear energy would be inefficient in terms of craft size
since it would require bio-engineering i assumed the thread would go here
 
Blood would be a bad sourse of fuel... since we each only have 4 pints or so...
and taking it causes us to die...

i have been contemplating a urine battery... since we make gallons of it, per week.

-MT
 
this has apparently not been good. you are assuming that we use blood in the process. no we use the blood in the same way that plants use chlorophyll. the blood will convert an unknown substance into enegy. the bio-suit converts the energy to power the ship
 
Btw, whether/how gasoline is chlorophyll?

How magnessium and iron as in chlorophyll and hemoglobin are interrelated esp. with stability(plants) and movement(animals)?

Which is older---plants or animals?
 
you are talking about a metabolic battery. .... and for such.. we are better off using urine..... since it is renewable.
-MT
 
blood is not an energy converter.

Blood transports oxygen and CO2. Well, blood has many more functions, but if you are talking about hemoglobin we can restrict the discussion to this.

How does a molecule used to transport gases provide for energy?
 
And, to add to spurious' question, where on earth did you hear that hemoglobin and chlorophyll are of similar structure?
 
Energy from blood - Leopold , are you thinking of a mitochondria (actually in the cells not in the blood ) .......... ????
A mitochondria can make energy ......
 
idle mind took care of it with his statement. i thought clorophyll and hemoglobin were structuraly similar except for the iron atom.

edit
there is a molecule similar to hemoglobin, in place of the iron atom there is magnesium. am i wrong about this?
 
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leopold99 said:
since hemoglobin and chlorophyll are similar in structure could hemoglobin be used as a power source. yeah i know it's a whacko idea but intrigueing nonetheless
a bio-mechanical suit, that sounds familiar
Click to expand...
Good question. You are correct that both chlorophyll and hemoglobin share very similar porphyrin ring structures with a metal in the center; the site on chlorophyll that absorbs light for conversion into energy is almost exactly the same as the site in hemoglobin where oxygen binds. However, I don’t think that your idea would work for two reasons.

First, when a porphyrin ring structure absorbs light and goes to a higher energy state it usually quickly relaxes back to its ground state. The magnesium atom in the center of a chlorophyll porphyrin slows down the relaxation process, allowing more time for the energy to be converted to useful chemical energy instead of being simply lost to relaxation. Unfortunately this wouldn’t work with iron, so after the hemoglobin absorbed light it would tend to drop back to the ground state too quickly for the energy to be captured.

Second, in chlorophyll there’s an “electron acceptor” molecule positioned above the porphyrin ring to capture the high-energy electron that’s generated when the ring absorbs light. Hemoglobin doesn’t have an electron-accepting group like this, so it probably wouldn’t be able to export the high-energy electron away from the ring for use somewhere else.

Still, it was an interesting idea…and not nearly as far-fetched as some of the other posters here seem to think.
 
Idle Mind said:
And, to add to spurious' question, where on earth did you hear that hemoglobin and chlorophyll are of similar structure?
Click to expand...
I would imagine from any basic textbook on organic chemistry.
Both are examples of important closely related classes of molecules, the porphyrins and the chlorins.
 
spuriousmonkey said:
Nasor,



Where would they energy come from to excite chlorophyll or hemoglobin?
Click to expand...
i was thinking about a dialysis type of setup where the blood would be routed through some sort of converter. the converter uses "photosynthesis type" of reaction to produce the energy. it seemed like it would work.
 
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