I posted the following question in Physics SE and was advised to transfer it to Chemistry SE.
I studied physics in college ten years ago and I recently started to learn biochemistry. I enjoy finding out that some familiar concepts in physics play important roles in biochemistry such as entropy and the Gibbs free energy.
For example, as a (ex-)student of physics, I am happy to know that the Gibbs free energy determines the directions of chemical reactions. I feel this is a good example where a sort of fundamental law of physics determines how a phenomenon looks like.
However, I still can not understand why the chemical reactions in a body need to be so complex. Many chemical systems consist of more than several steps to achieve their purposes. According to Wikipedia, glycolysis takes ten steps through its process. Why are so many steps necessary?
I tried to find out a physical law that prohibit the glycolysis process from being achieved in one or two steps, but I could not find an answer. I would like to know (or discuss) whether there is a physical law that makes chemical systems so complex (many steps required).
My assumption is that some physical law prohibit the existence of an enzyme that realizes a one-step process of glycolysis.
Answer
There is no fundamental law preventing simple chemical reactions: things are complex because of the combinatorial complexity of chemical compounds
The complexity of many chemical reactions is a byproduct of the fact that there is a very, very large variety of possible chemicals. Much of that complexity happens because of the almost infinite way even some simple elements can be combined together to give complicated structures (carbon being the archetypal example). Theoretically, for example (theoretical because not all of the examples can exist in 3D space) there are 366,319 ways to build different alkane compounds from just 20 carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms (see this question here and this entry in the Encyclopaedia of integer sequences). And this number drastically understates the real complexity as it ignores mirror images and more complicated ways of joining the carbon atoms together (like in rings, for example). The complexity just gets more mind boggling if you start adding other elements to the mix.
No physical law prevent us making any possible compound in one step. But the sheer complexity of the end products makes simple ways to reach many of them extraordinarily unlikely from the laws of probability alone, never mind the specific ways chemical components can be easily joined up to make more complex things.
Here is a simple analogy. Let's say you want to assemble a Lego model of the Star Wars Death Star weapon. There are 4,016 pieces of lego that have to be assembled in the right combination and the right order. There is no physical law that says you couldn't somehow do that in a single step. But no sane person's intuition would assume that this was easy or likely. It isn't physical law that prevents one step assembly: it is combinatorial complexity. Chemistry is, do I really need to say this, more complicated than Lego: not least because atoms can be joined up in many more complex ways than the simple, standard-sized physical pins that join Lego bricks together.
Both nature and synthetic chemists have explored many ways to achieve particular end products from simpler building blocks. Sometimes new chemical Death Star equivalents (like the geometrically beautiful hydrocarbon dodecahedrane, which, incidentally, has 20 carbons but isn't counted in the list of 20 carbon alkanes) are made only after long sequences of reactions. The original synthesis of dodecahedrane took 29 steps but others found better, higher yielding, routes that took only 20. Many important drugs are first synthesised in long sequences of reactions but are later found to be available via much shorter routes (there is nothing like the economics of manufacturing cost to encourage creativity).
So the reason many chemical reactions take multiple steps isn't physical laws but probability theory. There are just too many possible chemicals and too many ways to combine things for single step routes to most given products to be likely to work. Doing one thing at a time (just like you would if building the Lego Death Star) is the way to get what you want.
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