Doctor of medicine here, with basic notions of chemistry and biochemistry from courses I took 16 years ago. I sure know what I'm talking about! ;-) More serio

Doctor of medicine here, with basic notions of chemistry and biochemistry from courses I took 16 years ago. I sure know what I'm talking about! ;-) More seriously, I had inferred the squeezing from the videos I linked to. If I understand properly, the mechanical constrains on the ADP, Pi and AA residuals involved result in the formation of the high energy covalent bound between the two phosphates. Thus mechanical -> chemical energy. I thought that the pressure between the electron clouds of the two molecules caused some superficial electrons to hop, resulting in the new covalent bound (that's what I meant by squeezing), and the dehydration. Is this mostly correct (with possible intermediate steps where either the Pi or the ADP end up in a temporary covalent bound of even higher energy with subunits of the ÀTP synthase), or is this pure hogwash? Also, thanks for the explanations regarding the flagellum, that's very interesting :-) > I'll grant you there are no canonical gears as a mechanical engineer would recognize them. I wasn't talking about the motive coupling. But a number of the physical structures (proteins) that couple the anchoring to the moving body have gear like properties. These are used to orient and clock the moving body in its cycle. Is it mediated by alternating, matching stripes of charged or polar AA residuals?