If you had a whole lot of Adenosine Triphosphate piled together, what would it look like? Would it be very flammable?
I’ve only ever seen it in solution, which looked exactly like water.
ATP is a salt though, so I assume it would look whitish (based on the fact that it’s colourless in solution) and crystalline/granular/powdery.
I’ve no idea if it would burn on its own - I suspect not - it’s more like a catalyst.
It comes as a whiteish powder, kinda iridescent as small crystals. Many organic substances look much the same. It turned out when I took organic chem, all my assignments were solids, so after recrystallization, they all looked pretty much like this. It’s a pretty large organic molecule, I’d suspect it’d burn just like pure amino acid powder, or like sugar would.
With regards to flammability, solid ATP has “0” NHPA flammability rating – it won’t burn in any significant way. For a point of comparison, other simple organics like sugar are rated at “1”, since they’ll burn quite nicely but only at very high ambient temperature.
Organic molecules are almost universally unremarkable in the solid state. You need a special arrangement to get anything remotely interesting. Lots of double bonds with (non-carbon) in the mix will get you intense color. Otherwise, organic molecules are mostly white or off white.
We have a whole bottle of it in the lab. It looks like salt, which is what it is (you usually buy it as the sodium salt).
Whitish crystals.