Iconoclasm and innovation: the inevitable and the appreciable facets of murburn concept

Abstract

My cover-page credited article questioning the highly acclaimed ideas of chemiosmosis (Nobel Prize to Peter Mitchell, 1978) and rotary ATP synthesis (Nobel Prize to Paul Boyer, 1997) was first published for the dissemination of knowledge at Biomedical Reviews (2017). Thereafter, in the very same journal (in 2019), my group had called for jettisoning some redundant terminology/ ideas in bioenergetics field, as their impropriety and falsity had been established beyond reasonable doubt. PubMed surveys of leading periodicals of high impact (e.g. Cell, Nature, & Science) and some devoted bioenergetics journals (like BBA-Bioenergetics, Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, & Mitochondrion) still show some usage of classical terms like electron transport or respiratory chain, chemiosmosis, proton pump, proton motive force, mitochondrial membrane potential, rotary ATP synthesis, ATP synthase, etc. However, murburn pursuits seem to have dampened the further consolidation of the Keilin-Mitchell-Boyer paradigm. Although citations (critical or appreciative) for murburn concept are not forthcoming, some of our articles are well- read by the community. As iconoclasm and innovation are two sides of the same coin of science, it is hoped that murburn concept would soon gain traction with the bioenergetics research community. Towards this purpose, in this review, I succinctly list the salient publications that demonstrate various core aspects of murburn concept.