Coupling Through Emergent Conservation Laws (Part 7)

joint post with Jonathan Lorand, Blake Pollard, and Maru Sarazola

Last time we examined ATP hydrolysis as a simple example of coupling through emergent conservation laws, but the phenomenon is more general. A slightly more complicated example is the urea cycle. The first metabolic cycle to be discovered, it is used by land-dwelling vertebrates to convert ammonia, which is highly toxic, to urea for excretion. Now we’ll find 11 conserved quantities in the urea cycle, including 7 emergent ones.

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