I thought Carbohydrate metabolism through respiration or fermentation required, for the electron transport chain, during any energy transfer in solution, especially cellular oxidations, that there are free hydroxide and hydronium ions? ..thanks i think....lol. Back to basics.
But not only that, and please correct me if I am wrong....here is a cut and paste from my Micro class....sorry bad scan but readable I hope.
That is correct--but this refers to the intracellular needs--not the needs outside of the cell. Keep in mind where this carbohydrate synthesis is happening. The cell maintains a proton gradient (and can get OH from water). Hydronium (H30+) is just a fancy way of saying you have water with free protons in it. If you're growing bennies--what you'll find is that your pH will swing (up usually). It IS good to have it more on the acidic side if anything because there are various proton pumps which operate at the cell/solution interface.
Often I find that pH is too difficult a concept to properly explain to people in short fashion--because it involves various equations and such that do not really lend themselves to quick working (and most of the answers are non-obvious from the outset).
I've often found the best way to describe what is happening is that in PURE water, OH- and H+ have a large affinity for one another, and so they stick together as water. Even in the best of conditions, however--for any volume of water there is a constant, albeit small, amount of water molecules which exist as a free OH- and H+--very briefly--and probably in different localities in the water sample at any given time.
This number has been calculated and it is ~ 1.0x10^-7 mol/L and it is called ionization constant of water. Water undergoes this process of
autoionization even in the purest of samples.
As we add different things into the water--we change the affinities of these molecules for one another, either shifting the equation to the right or to the left. This is how an acid or base solution is formed. If we add something which can grab a proton more tightly than free molecules of water can (the ionization constant)--we leave an OH- in solution and make it more basic.
When we add something which likes to grab an OH- more tightly than a proton (also the ionization constant), we leave a free proton in solution and make it more acidic.
If we plug these coefficients into the Henderson-Hesselbach equation pH= pKa + log ([A-]/[HA]) in the proper places we end up with the following:
pKa water = -log(Ka water) = -log (1.0x10^-7) = 7
log [A-]/[HA] = log(1.0x10^-7/1.0x10^-7) = log (1) = 0
pH= pKa + log ([A-]/[HA])
pH = 7 + 0
pH = 7
Which is what we expect for pure water.
p denotes negative log. and pH is really -log ([H+]) where [] denotes concentration in molarity.
If we solve the equation above, pH = 7, for [H+], we end up back at the dissociation constant of water, 1.0x10-7. IE, at neutral pH, this is how many free protons are in solution in moles/liter (and you'll find that there are the same number of hydroxide ions).
Protons are never really "free", water grabs them pretty tightly still to form hydronium, or H3O+.