What does lactic acid do in the search process?
Answers
Explanation:
Lactic acid, or lactate, is a chemical byproduct of anaerobic respiration — the process by which cells produce energy without oxygen around. Bacteria produce it in yogurt and our guts. Lactic acid is also in our blood, where it's deposited by muscle and red blood cells.
It was long thought that lactic acid was the cause of muscle soreness during and after an intense period of exercise, but recent research suggests that's not true, said Michael Gleeson, an exercise biochemist at Loughborough University in the U.K., and author of "Eat, Move, Sleep, Repeat" (Meyer & Meyer Sport, 2020).
"Lactate has always been thought of as the bad boy of exercise," Gleeson told Live Science.
Contrary to that reputation, lactic acid is a constant, harmless presence in our bodies. While it does increase in concentration when we exercise hard, it returns to normal levels as soon as we're able to rest — and even gets recycled back into energy our body can use later on, Gleeson said.
How muscles produce lactic acid
Throughout most of the day, our body burns energy aerobically — that is, in the presence of oxygen. Part of that energy comes from sugar, which our muscle cells break down in a series of chemical reactions called glycolysis. (We also get energy from fat, but that involves a whole other chemical process). The end product of glycolysis is pyruvate, a chemical that the body uses to produce even more energy. But energy can be harvested from pyruvate only in the presence of oxygen. That changes during hard exercise.
Related: Muscle spasms and cramps: Causes and treatments
When you break into an all-out sprint your muscles start working overtime. The harder you work, the more energy your muscles need to sustain your pace. Luckily, our muscles have built-in turbo-boosters, called fast-twitch muscle. Unlike slow-twitch muscle, which we use for most of the day, fast-twitch muscle is super-effective at producing lots of energy quickly and does so anaerobically, Gleeson said. Fast-twitch muscle also uses glycolysis to produce energy, but it skips harvesting energy from pyruvate, a process that takes oxygen. Instead, pyruvate gets converted into a waste product, lactic acid, and released into the bloodstream.
It's a common misconception that muscle cells produce lactic acid when they can't get enough oxygen, Gleeson said. "That's not the case. Your muscles are getting plenty of oxygen," he said. But in times of intense energy needs, muscles switch to anaerobic respiration simply because it's a much quicker way to produce energy.
Answer:
Lactic Acid is produced by the bacterias called Lactobacillus.It is formed during the curdling of milk.In the search process it can turn the blue litmus to red.