Whole Cells - Molecular Theory of the Living Cell - page 439

represent processes that implicate not only the electromagnetic force but also a new
force that is intrinsic to these processes which happen to occur inside the living cell
in contrast to those processes represented by Points 1, 2, and 5 that occur outside
of living cells. It may be justified to refer to this new force as the cell force , since its
action is postulated to be confined to the interior of the living cell just as the strong
force is confined within the atomic nuclei (Han 1999; Huang 2007). If the proposed
explanation for the trajectory in Fig. 12.26a turns out to be true, we may have here
the first experimental evidence supporting the concept of the cell force that was
invoked in Ji (1991; see Appendix K) based on a qualitative application of the
Yang-Mills gauge field theory to cell biology in part inspired by the field theory of
cell metabolism described in Smith and Welch (1991).
Therefore, it may be reasonable to refer to the trajectory in Fig. 12.26a as
the “blackbody radiation trajectory (BRTs)” or, more speculatively, as the “black-
body radiation RG trajectory” suggesting that the so-called bare theory (Huang
2007, pp. 219-225) behind BRTs is QED and the single-molecule enzymology
(Point 2) and the theory of protein folding (Point 5) represent the renormalized
version of QED.
12.14 The Quantization of the Gibbs Free Energy Levels
of Enzymes and the Living Cell
The finding that the rate constant (or waiting time) data of a single-molecule of
cholesterol oxidase fit the blackbody radiation-like equation (BRE) (see Fig. 11.24 )
led me to postulate that the Gibbs free energy of the cholesterol oxidase molecule
is quantized (or associated with discrete Gibbs free energy levels) as visualized
in Fig. 11.28 .
This postulate is supported by the fact that the Gibbs free energy changes
accompanying protein denaturation also fit BRE (see Panel f in Fig. 12.25 ),
suggesting that both enzymic catalysis and protein denaturation require thermal
excitations of proteins from their ground-state free energy levels (depicted as C 1
through C n in Fig. 11.28 ) to their excited/activated states (depicted as C { in the
same figure) leading to catalysis or denaturation.
Based on these observations, I postulate that the Gibbs free energy levels of
enzyme molecules in the living cell are quantized. The biochemical and cell
biological consequences of this cannot be fully gauged without taking into account
the molecular environment of the cell in which enzymes function. Figure 12.27
depicts simplified biochemical pathways involved in determining the intracellular
concentrations of mRNA molecules. The cross-hatched lines in Fig. 12.27 symbolize
the cytoskeleton to which most biopolymers (including transcriptosomes and
degradosomes ) are probably bound most of the time, exhibiting the phenomenon of