In this video, we'll take a big picture look at phase c oxidation when it comes to fatty acid oxidation. Here, we're going to say that the beta oxidation pathway consists of 4 repeated reactions. We're going to say, it cleaves 2 carbons. So we're going to have Acetyl CoA from the fatty acid chain in each cycle. We're going to say here, one cycle of the pathway produces 1 FADH2, 1 NADH, and 1 Acetyl CoA. If we take a look here, we have our fatty acid. We undergo these repeated reactions. So one cycle here, we produce FADH2 and NADH as our energy molecules, high energy molecules. We're going to create Acetyl CoA over here, so 2 carbons. Notice that we started out with 2, 4, 6, 8 carbons here.
But my fatty acid chain is now only 6 because 2 of them are part of Acetyl CoA over here. So what I've done is I've shortened my fatty acid chain. So we have our fatty acid, we've shortened it through oxidation to produce Acetyl CoA, and then because we still have additional carbons on this chain we could go through additional cycles. Here, we're looking at just one cycle though. We are creating 1 FADH2, 1 NADH, we're creating 1 Acetyl CoA, and we have this shortened fatty acid.
