Answer:
Cellular respiration is a metabolic pathway that breaks down glucose and produces ATP. The stages of cellular respiration include glycolysis, pyruvate oxidation, the citric acid or Krebs cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation.
Cellular respiration is one of the most elegant, majestic, and fascinating metabolic pathways on earth. At the same time, it’s also one of the most complicated. When I learned about it for the first time, I felt like I had tripped and fallen into a can of organic-chemistry-flavored alphabet soup!
Luckily, cellular respiration is not so scary once you get to know it. Let's start by looking at cellular respiration at a high level, walking through the four major stages and tracing how they connect up to one another.
During cellular respiration, a glucose molecule is gradually broken down into carbon dioxide and water. Along the way, some ATP is produced directly in the reactions that transform glucose. Much more ATP, however, is produced later in a process called oxidative phosphorylation. Oxidative phosphorylation is powered by the movement of electrons through the electron transport chain, a series of proteins embedded in the inner membrane of the mitochondrion
