Elodea And Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants turn carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen. Photosynthesis occurs alongside cellular respiration, which is a process that takes place in plant cells and animal cells alike. Cellular respiration takes sugars and turns those sugars into energy for living organisms. While animal cells obtain sugar from an outside source, plants synthesize their own sugar in a series of anabolic reactions powered by sunlight. The photosynthetic pigments present in a plant, such as chlorophyll, allow the plant to harness energy from the sun and perform the reactions necessary for photosynthesis. Various wavelengths of light from the sun are used to power photosynthesis, and different wavelengths correspond to different colors. Plants tend to absorb very little green light, reflecting most of it and causing plants to appear green to the human eye. On the other hand, previous research has shown that plants tend to absorb red and blue light effectively (Yang et al. 2018; Amiri et al, 2018). Because plants showed a preference to those colors in previous studies, it was wondered if Elodea, an aquatic plant often called waterweeds, would also utilize such wavelengths better. …show more content…
Elodea’s photosynthetic pigments were also extracted and used to plot an absorbance curve. Because plants are known to reflect green light, it was hypothesized that Elodea under the green bulb would have the lowest gross photosynthetic rate and the lowest absorbance on the spectrum. It was also hypothesized that Elodea under the red and blue lights would have the highest gross photosynthetic rates and the wavelengths corresponding to red, blue, and purple would have the highest