What happens if you drink a large amount of ATP contained in a solution?

[royzizzle]

How will your body try to get rid of the excess ATP? will the kidneys get rid of it or will the ATP just sit in your muscles until you use them. or will it not even go to your bloodstream and diarea gets rid of it?

i know this seems like a really stupid question but i haven't taken any biology classes.

thanks

 

[Andy Resnick]

I don't know what 'excess ATP' means. If you dissolve ATP in water, it will quickly hydrolyze until equilibrium is reached ([ATP]/[ADP][Pi]), at which point your body cannot get any work out of the solution- and that neglects whether or not the stomach will further degrade ATP and ADP in the pH 1 environment.

AFAIK, your mitochondria crank out ATP as fast as possible; the rate-limiting step is the availability of glucose. I suspect ATP synthesis will continue until the energy cost of creating a molecule of ATP is more than can be obtained by the various metabolic reactions (oxidative phosphorylation and glycolysis).

Also, ATP is a signalling molecule: ATP in the airway fluid, urine, blood, etc. will initiate various signalling pathways via purinergic receptors in epithelial tissue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate

 

[zomgwtf]

Agree with everything Andy has said. Even if you could use a solution that ATP can just sit in without hydrolyzing the body does not appear to use ATP from external source. There are these pills called AdenylPro which was an a pill to be taken as an oral form of ATP. The theory was that it would increase the amount of time you spend at maximal output for your muscles. After experiments (which I haven't gone to look for, I'm sure you can just search AdenylPro in google) they found that the pills did not help increase anything. No performance effects were noted in the experiment.

One thing we do not know however is exactly what your question originally was: What the body does with external sources of ATP. I think it just gets broken down.