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Gas exchange is the physical process by which gases move passively by diffusion across a surface. For example, this surface might be the air/water interface of a water body, the surface of a gas bubble in a liquid, a gas-permeable membrane, or a biological membrane that forms the boundary between an organism and its extracellular environment.
This blood gas barrier is extremely thin (in humans, on average, 2.2 μm thick). It is folded into about 300 million small air sacs called alveoli [23] (each between 75 and 300 μm in diameter) branching off from the respiratory bronchioles in the lungs, thus providing an extremely large surface area (approximately 145 m 2) for gas exchange to ...
Exchange of gases in the lung occurs by ventilation and perfusion. [1] Ventilation refers to the in-and-out movement of air of the lungs and perfusion is the circulation of blood in the pulmonary capillaries. [1] In mammals, physiological respiration involves respiratory cycles of inhaled and exhaled breaths.
In very small animals, plants and bacteria, simple diffusion of gaseous metabolites is sufficient for respiratory function and no special adaptations are found to aid respiration. Passive diffusion or active transport are also sufficient mechanisms for many larger aquatic animals such as many worms, jellyfish, sponges, bryozoans and similar ...
While the term lenticel is usually associated with the breakage of periderm tissue that is associated with gas exchange, it also refers to the lightly colored spots found on apples (a type of pome fruit). "Lenticel" seems to be the most appropriate term to describe both structures mentioned in light of their similar function in gas exchange.
A typical pair of human lungs contains about 480 million alveoli, [11] providing a total surface area for gas exchange of between 70 and 80 square metres. [10] Each alveolus is wrapped in a fine mesh of capillaries covering about 70% of its area. [12] The diameter of an alveolus is between 200 and 500 μm. [12]
Plant ecophysiology is concerned largely with two topics: mechanisms (how plants sense and respond to environmental change) and scaling or integration (how the responses to highly variable conditions—for example, gradients from full sunlight to 95% shade within tree canopies—are coordinated with one another), and how their collective effect on plant growth and gas exchange can be ...
Cutaneous respiration, or cutaneous gas exchange (sometimes called skin breathing), [1] is a form of respiration in which gas exchange occurs across the skin or outer integument of an organism rather than gills or lungs. Cutaneous respiration may be the sole method of gas exchange, or may accompany other forms, such as ventilation.