What salient control mechanism or mechanism directs metaboli

What salient control mechanism or mechanism directs metabolite flow between glycolysis and TCA cycle?

Solution

Cellular metabolic pathways are closely coupled to each other in order to maintain a homeostatic balance between various substrates and products. These metabolic pathways such as glycolysis and TCA cycle are connected to each other by a discrete metabolite which can serve as a product in one cycle, but a substrate in another cycle.

Glycolysis is the metabolic pathway which takes place in the cytosol of the cells and directs the conversion of glucose to pyruvate as final product with release of energy. In aerobic organisms, this pyruvate then enters the Kreb\'s cycle or TCA cycle in the mitochondria. The mitochondria contains numerous enzymes which regulate the conversion of pyruvate to various metabolites with release of reducing equivalent species. These reducing equivalent species are simultaneously coupled to aerobic respiration going on inside the electron transport chain and finally after a subsequent round of redox reactions, molecular oxygen, water and ATP are released.

Thus, this summary concludes that there should be a control mechanism which directs a physiological control between glycolysis and TCA cycle. These mechanisms can be summarized as below:

Thus, this explains that all the metabolic pathways including TCA cycle and glycolysis are inter-dependent upon each other and are closely regulated by various homeostatic pathways.