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C 4 carbon fixation or the Hatch–Slack pathway is one of three known photosynthetic processes of carbon fixation in plants. It owes the names to the 1960s discovery by Marshall Davidson Hatch and Charles Roger Slack. [1] C 4 fixation is an addition to the ancestral and more common C 3 carbon fixation.
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]
Photosynthesis usually refers to oxygenic photosynthesis, a process that produces oxygen. Photosynthetic organisms store the chemical energy so produced within intracellular organic compounds (compounds containing carbon) like sugars, glycogen , cellulose and starches .
Photosynthesis is the only process that allows the conversion of atmospheric carbon (CO2) to organic (solid) carbon, and this process plays an essential role in climate models. This lead researchers to study the sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (i.e., chlorophyll fluorescence that uses the Sun as illumination source; the glow of a plant) as ...
The Calvin cycle thus happens when light is available independent of the kind of photosynthesis (C3 carbon fixation, C4 carbon fixation, and crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM)); CAM plants store malic acid in their vacuoles every night and release it by day to make this process work. [2]
The C4 pathway was rediscovered by Marshall Hatch and Roger Slack (to whom the discovery is sometimes wrongly credited). [ 2 ] In 1981 Kortschak, along with Hatch and Slack, won the Rank Prize in Nutrition for "outstanding work on the mechanism of photosynthesis which established the existence of an alternative pathway for the initial fixation ...
Although C 2 photosynthesis is traditionally understood as an intermediate step between C 3 and C 4, a wide variety of plant lineages do end up in the C 2 stage without further evolving, showing that it is an evolutionary steady state of its own.