Importance And Importance Of Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is so important that, without it, there wouldn’t be life on Earth. Photosynthesis is the process in which light energy is transformed into chemical energy. During photosynthesis, the chemical energy is used to obtain organic compounds from carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide and water are the raw materials. The main energy source is the sunlight absorbed by the plant. Then oxygen and glucose are produced. This is what facilitates cellular respiration in humans. During that process, water is used and then O2 is released into the atmosphere. These organic compounds are important to plant life because it is what helps a plant grow and fully develop. Plants are photoautotrophs meaning they feed of themselves using the sun. Plants aren’t the only ones that benefit from this magnificent process. Animals benefit from this because they consume the plants and then all the molecules obtained are then converted into their own organic molecules. These organic molecules are the main energy source for the animals.

During photosynthesis, pigments play an important role. Pigments is what allows photosynthesis to occur. It is the substance that absorbs the sunlight. Pigments is what allows us to see if light was absorbed or not. But pigments do not reflect every wavelength of light. These chemical compounds are useful to plants because they are the ones that capture and harvest the energy of sunlight. Pigments exist mainly in the chloroplast. Based on their photosynthetic pigments, is how they capture the energy from a specific wavelength. During photosynthesis, pigments allow the plant to use the light reaching it and then it increases the amount of chemical energy. These light absorbing compounds work together with chlorophyll a. Thi...

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...linder. We let it dry and then we repeated the application of the extract on the pencil line up to four times. Make sure the band of pigments are really dark. The following steps were performed in a hood. Following the previous step, we placed the pigment extract to chromatographic paper that was in a cylinder. The cylinder then will be placed in a jar with petroleum ether and acetone. Let the chromatography advance 3 cm over the cylinder. Lastly, the cylinder was taken out from the jar. When analyzing the paper chromatography, golden yellow represented carotene, pale yellow represented xanthophyll, green grass represented chlorophyll a, and yellow- green represented chlorophyll b. Chlorophyll b was all the way at the bottom of the paper making it the most polar and the least soluble in the solvent. Carotene was the most nonpolar and the most soluble in the solvent.