Most
photosynthetic plants on Earth use chlorophyll which absorbs blue and red light and less green light and so appears green.
On Earth,
photosynthetic plants on land tends to use relatively abundant red and more energetic blue light (more).
Not exact matches
As a graduate student working
on the mechanisms of
photosynthetic enzymes, my Ph.D. advisor and I pondered how to increase
plant productivity through genetic engineering.
The question of how
photosynthetic efficiency is maintained affects
plants on which humans depend, including crops and even forests, so answering this question has practical implications for improving agricultural productivity.
«Because these
plants are
photosynthetic, it's not surprising to find that as the amount of sea ice cover declined, the amount of [photosynthesis] increased,» says biological oceanographer Kevin Arrigo of Stanford University's School of Earth Sciences, who led an effort to use the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) devices
on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites to determine changes in phytoplankton growth.
Using high - performance computing and genetic engineering to boost the
photosynthetic efficiency of
plants offers the best hope of increasing crop yields enough to feed a planet expected to have 9.5 billion people
on it by 2050, researchers report in the journal Cell.
Most
plants rely
on the C3 process, which uses carbon dioxide and fixes three - carbon compounds in a
photosynthetic cycle, but a few have evolved the more efficient C4 variety, developing a competitive edge by fixing four carbons per cycle.
If comparatively more bluish or reddish light reaches a planet's surface than
on Earth,
photosynthetic plant - type life may may not be greenish in color, because such life will have evolved to different pigments in order to optimize their use of available and so color the appearance of the planet's land surfaces accordingly.
After over three billion years of evolution in the oceans, multi-cellular life — beginning with green algae, fungi, and
plants (liverworts, mosses, ferns, then vascular and flowering
plants)-- began adapting to land habitats by creating a new «hypersea,» and adding anomalous shades of green to Earth's coloration more than 472 million years ago (Matt Walker, BBC News, October 12, 2010; and Qiu et al, 1998 — more
on the evolution of
photosynthetic life and
plants on Earth).
In dim habitats, alien vegetation would need more
photosynthetic pigments that capture radiation in a wider range of wavelengths, which would give them a dark appearance like many dark
plants and flowers
on Earth (more).
Exploiting habitats that are often or mostly out of water required new symbiotic relationships to contain and move water, including the fusion of some fungi and algae to create lichen in communities with bacteria that survive extreme desiccation
on land while breaking down rock into soil, and the association of mycorrhizae fungi and the root tissue of new vascular
plants — culminating in trees that pump water high into the air — to exchange mineral nutrients (e.g., phosphorus) and usable «fixed» nitrogen from the atmosphere for
photosynthetic products.
Given at least nine meters (roughly 30 feet) of water
on the planet,
photosynthetic microbes (including mats of algae, cyanobacteria, and other
photosynthetic bacteria) and
plant - like protoctists (such as floating seaweed or kelp forests attached to the seafloor) could be protected from «planet - scalding» ultraviolet flares produced by young red dwarf stars, according to Victoria Meadows of Caltech, principal investigator at the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory.
As proposed by Andrew Goldsworthy in 1987, cyanobacteria and later chloroplast - related protists and
plants developed after microbes that used a purple pigment bacteriorhodopsin that absorbs green light dominated the oceans, and so the new
photosynthetic cyanobacteria were forced to use the left - over light with chlorophyll that reflects green light, which was too complex to change even after purple - reflecting
photosynthetic lifeforms were no longer dominant (Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist, September 10, 2010 — more
on the evolution of
photosynthetic life and
plants on Earth).
According to Dr. Woo, they first ground up kale and spinach leaves to combine with heart tissues
on petri dishes, but the
photosynthetic organs of the
plants became unstable and were quick to expire.
Reasoning that, because it fluctuated daily, water vapour was continually recycling itself in and out of the atmosphere, he turned his attention to carbon dioxide, a gas resident for a long time in the atmosphere whose concentration was only (at that time) dramatically changed by major sources such as volcanoes or major drawdowns such as unusual and massive episodes of mineral weathering or the evolution of
photosynthetic plants: events that occur
on very long, geological timescales.
Plant life - history strategies, photosynthetic type and life - forms (Hodgson, Wilson, Hunt, Grime, and Thompson, 1999; Niu et al., 2005; Bhatterai and Vetaas, 2005) are plant characteristics showing variable distribution on both local and wider sc
Plant life - history strategies,
photosynthetic type and life - forms (Hodgson, Wilson, Hunt, Grime, and Thompson, 1999; Niu et al., 2005; Bhatterai and Vetaas, 2005) are
plant characteristics showing variable distribution on both local and wider sc
plant characteristics showing variable distribution
on both local and wider scales.
If a leaf is damaged, a
plant may also abscise it to conserve water or
photosynthetic efficiency, depending
on the «costs» to the
plant as a whole.
Increased weed and pest pressure associated with longer growing seasons and warmer winters will be an increasingly important challenge; there are already examples of earlier arrival and increased populations of some insect pests such as corn earworm.64 Furthermore, many of the most aggressive weeds, such as kudzu, benefit more than crop
plants from higher atmospheric carbon dioxide, and become more resistant to herbicide control.72 Many weeds respond better than most cash crops to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations, particularly «invasive» weeds with the so - called C3
photosynthetic pathway, and with rapid and expansive growth patterns, including large allocations of below - ground biomass, such as roots.73 Research also suggests that glyphosate (for example, Roundup), the most widely - used herbicide in the United States, loses its efficacy
on weeds grown at the increased carbon dioxide levels likely to occur in the coming decades.74 To date, all weed / crop competition studies where the
photosynthetic pathway is the same for both species favor weed growth over crop growth as carbon dioxide is increased.72
Reasoning that, because it fluctuated daily, water vapour was continually recycling itself in and out of the atmosphere, he turned his attention to carbon dioxide, a gas resident for a long time in the atmosphere whose concentration was only (at that time) dramatically changed by major sources such as volcanoes or major drawdowns such as unusual and massive episodes of mineral weathering or the evolution of
photosynthetic plants: events that occur
on very long, geological timescales.