Photosynthesis Lab

The grand majority of plants use photosynthesis to obtain their energy to sustain. Plants perform photosynthesis by converting natural light into chemical energy *.In photosynthesis there are three different types of metabolic pathways for carbon fixation, this includes C3, C4 and CAM*. the CAM method was not observed in this lab. In the C3 method the plant converts CO2 to 3- phosphogylycerate which a 3 carbon which then enters the calvin cycle of photosynthesis *. While in the C4 methode CO2 is attached to a phophoenolpyruvate in the mesophyll cell in the plate which causes oxaloacetate to form.The Oxaloacetate is a 4 carbon cell which is then brought to the bundle sheath cell of the plant to be decaboxylated to release the CO2 to be use in …show more content…
Corn represented the the C4 methode while the bean plant represent the C3 method.These plants were obtained from a growth chamber and were in a yong stage of their development. A machine called a Licor Li 6400XT Portable Photosynthesis Machine was then used to measure the photosynthetic rate of the plants under different light conditions. To limit other factors that effect the photosynthetic rate the machine was set to certain environment conditions that were used for each plant (Table 1).Examining one plant at a time, a leaf of the plant was placed in the machine and the photosynthetic rate was monitored at the highest light intensity of 2400 µmol m-2 s-1 for 5 minutes and the rate was documentent. This was repeated with each subsequent level of light intensity except for at a duration of 1 minute each. To calculate the rate of effiencency we obtained the mean of the class data for each light intensity for both plants( Table 2, Table 3 ). The means of photosynthetic rate were then used as points to plot a light response curve for each plant(Figure 1). Using the these curve the slope was calculated by using the formula, slope = Y2- Y1/ X2-X1. The slope is the rate of effiencency in