BSCI 10001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Purple Sulfur Bacteria, Photosystem, Photosynthesis
28 Apr 2019
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Plant a little seed in the ground, and a mighty tree grows up from it. Most of it comes from air and water ! The wood of the tree is almost entirely made of carbohydrate [(ch2o)n] (cellulose) The carbon (c) and oxygen (o) in wood carbohydrate [(ch2o)n] comes from the co2 in the air. He found that the tree now weighed 169 lbs (164 lb added weight), whereas the weight of the soil had decreased by only 2 oz. Photosynthesis is the ability to use light energy to reduce co2 to carbohydrate. At the beginning of the last century, it was widely (but mistakenly) thought that the o2 that is produced by plants during photosynthesis came from the co2 molecule: Van niel was studying photosynthesis in purple sulfur bacteria: Van niel reasoned that the bacteria split h2s and used the hydrogen to make sugar from co2.
