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This produces a bolus which is swallowed down the esophagus to enter the stomach. The second stage, the gastric phase, happens in the stomach. Here, the food is further broken down by mixing with gastric acid until it passes into the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. The third stage, the intestinal phase, begins in the duodenum.
Proteins in cells are broken into amino acids. This intracellular degradation of protein serves multiple functions: It removes damaged and abnormal proteins and prevents their accumulation. It also serves to regulate cellular processes by removing enzymes and regulatory proteins that are no longer needed.
Digestion is a form of catabolism that is often divided into two processes based on how food is broken down: mechanical and chemical digestion. The term mechanical digestion refers to the physical breakdown of large pieces of food into smaller pieces which can subsequently be accessed by digestive enzymes .
Since digestion occurs outside the cell, it is said to be extracellular. It takes place either in the lumen of the digestive system, in a gastric cavity or other digestive organ, or completely outside the body. During extracellular digestion, food is broken down outside the cell either mechanically or with acid by special molecules called enzymes.
Protein catabolism often begins with pepsin, which converts proteins into polypeptides. These polypeptides are then further degraded. In humans, the pancreatic proteases include trypsin, chymotrypsin, and other enzymes. In the intestine, the small peptides are broken down into amino acids that can be absorbed into the bloodstream.
The role of gastric acid in digestion was established in the 1820s and 1830s by William Beaumont on Alexis St. Martin, who, as a result of an accident, had a fistula (hole) in his stomach, which allowed Beaumont to observe the process of digestion and to extract gastric acid, verifying that acid played a crucial role in digestion.
Intracellular digestion can also refer to the process in which animals that lack a digestive tract bring food items into the cell for the purposes of digestion for nutritional needs. This kind of intracellular digestion occurs in many unicellular protozoans, in Pycnogonida , in some molluscs , Cnidaria and Porifera .
The unit, named after Blaise Pascal, is an SI coherent derived unit defined as one newton per square metre (N/m 2). [1] It is also equivalent to 10 barye (10 Ba) in the CGS system. Common multiple units of the pascal are the hectopascal (1 hPa = 100 Pa), which is equal to one millibar , and the kilopascal (1 kPa = 1000 Pa), which is equal to ...