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C 4 photosynthesis reduces photorespiration by concentrating CO 2 around RuBisCO. To enable RuBisCO to work in a cellular environment where there is a lot of carbon dioxide and very little oxygen, C 4 leaves generally contain two partially isolated compartments called mesophyll cells and bundle-sheath cells.
Maize (Zea mays, Poaceae) is the most widely cultivated C 4 plant.[1]In botany, C 4 carbon fixation is one of three known methods of photosynthesis used by plants. C 4 plants increase their photosynthetic efficiency by reducing or suppressing photorespiration, which mainly occurs under low atmospheric CO 2 concentration, high light, high temperature, drought, and salinity.
The adaptations of C4 plants provide an advantage over the C3 pathway, which loses efficiency due to photorespiration. [22] The ratio of photorespiration to photosynthesis in a plant varies with environmental conditions, since decreased CO 2 and elevated O 2 concentrations would increase the efficiency of photorespiration. [20]
[citation needed] [26] In C 4 photosynthesis, carbon is fixed by an enzyme called PEP carboxylase, which, like all enzymes involved in C 4 photosynthesis, originated from non-photosynthetic ancestral enzymes. [27] [28] A second mechanism, CAM photosynthesis, is a carbon fixation pathway that evolved in some plants as an adaptation to arid ...
The following is a breakdown of the energetics of the photosynthesis process from Photosynthesis by Hall and Rao: [6]. Starting with the solar spectrum falling on a leaf, 47% lost due to photons outside the 400–700 nm active range (chlorophyll uses photons between 400 and 700 nm, extracting the energy of one 700 nm photon from each one)
C4 carbon fixation evolved to circumvent photorespiration, but can occur only in certain plants native to very warm or tropical climates—corn, for example. Furthermore, RuBisCOs catalyzing the light-independent reactions of photosynthesis generally exhibit an improved specificity for CO 2 relative to O 2, in order to minimize the oxygenation ...
Cyanobacteria such as these carry out photosynthesis. Their emergence foreshadowed the evolution of many photosynthetic plants and oxygenated Earth's atmosphere. Biological carbon fixation, or сarbon assimilation, is the process by which living organisms convert inorganic carbon (particularly carbon dioxide, CO 2) to organic compounds.
C4P is the reason corn and sugarcane grow so rapidly. Engineering C4 photosynthesis into rice could increase yields per hectare by roughly 50 percent. The current cultivar still relies primarily on C3 photosynthesis. To get them to completely adopt C4P, the plants must produce specialized cells in a precise arrangement: one set of cells to ...