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"Retinal-containing cell membranes exhibit a single light absorption peak centered in the energy-rich green-yellow region of the visible spectrum, but transmit
by weinzierl 1y ago
"Retinal-containing cell membranes exhibit a single light absorption peak centered in the energy-rich green-yellow region of the visible spectrum, but transmit and reflect red and blue light, resulting in a magenta color.[5] Chlorophyll pigments, in contrast, absorb red and blue light, but little or no green light [..]"
I wonder why no plant evolved to use both and make the more even efficient use of light. These plats would appear dark, maybe almost black. They could live between all the green plants from their scraps so to speak.
"However, the porphyrin-based nature of chlorophyll had created an evolutionary trap[citation needed], dictating that chlorophyllic organisms cannot re-adapt to absorb the energy-rich and now-available green light, and therefore ended up reflecting and presenting a greenish color."
Yes, but why?
- pc486 1y agoAs far as I understand it, this is a still debated question. One theory is it's about evaporating water: Plausible photomolecular effect leading to water evaporation exceeding the thermal limit (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2312751120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2312751120). There are black plants though! And they're studied for the same kind of questions. E.g. The Functional Significance of Black-Pigmented Leaves: Photosynthesis, Photoprotection and Productivity in Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3691134/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3691134/)
- verisimi 1y agoNigrescens is overdue a 'naming review' with the Culture Ministry.
- darth_avocado 1y agoA few different threads based on my limited online research: 1. Absorbing all spectrum of light would provide more energy than the organisms can handle. They need gas to run the engine, and all spectrum would provide jet fuel. 2. Current predominant species of plants evolved from the undergrowth. Original plants would absorb only green, so the undergrowth evolved to absorb the other spectrums because that’s what was left. After a few planet scale extinction events where the sunlight was scarce, being able to absorb a wider spectrum became a successful evolutionary trait and became the predominant one. 3. There are species of fungi that use melanin to absorb radiation for energy source and appear black.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoIn fact, many plants already receive too much sunlight and have various mechanisms to limit their exposure.
- luqtas 1y ago> Absorbing all spectrum of light would provide more energy than the organisms can handle. They need gas to run the engine, and all spectrum would provide jet fuel. one could ask why not a bigger/powerful organism. and a nice answer for that would be: more energy, more stuff going on, more bad mutations having the chance to exist; impaired evolution ;)
- adrian_b 1y agoWhile all the phototrophs that are able to split water and produce free oxygen use chlorophyll a, which absorbs only red light and violet light, resulting in a blue-green color, which can be seen as such in some lichens and cyanobacteria, most of them have some accessory pigments, which absorb other parts of the solar spectrum, and then transfer the energy to chlorophyll a. The green algae, which live only in shallow waters, and the terrestrial plants use as accessory pigment only chlorophyll b, which absorbs a different band of red light than chlorophyll a and also blue light, resulting in a green color. This is enough for green algae and land plants, because where they live there is abundant light. For land plants the problem is that they have too much light, not too little, with the exception of those which grow under the shadow of trees. On the other hand, most marine algae use accessory pigments that absorb much more of the solar spectrum, so that the color of chlorophyll is no longer visible and they have overall colors like red, yellow or brown, even very dark brown. This enables such algae to live down to greater depths in the water, where there is less solar light. So there are a lot of living beings that make very efficient use of light. Moreover, under water there are many places where practically all light is captured, by multiple layers of algae and bacteria, each layer absorbing some part of the solar spectrum. Even the near infrared light is absorbed by a bottom layer of bacteria, which do not produce oxygen, because the energy of infrared photons is insufficient to split water.
- throwawaymaths 1y agotechnically the energy in green is also not enough to split water, which (IIRC) is why PSII must ping pong the photon through multiple collector complexes to achieve an electron with enough energy to crack water.
- adrian_b 1y agoNope. The energy required to split water is around 1.25 eV, while the energy of red photons is already around 1.5 V and the energy of green photons is well above 2 eV. However, it is true that plants need 2 red photons (or of higher energy), not 1, to generate both free oxygen and a reduced organic substance, NADPH, which is used later to reduce carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. The reason is that the captured solar energy is used not only for these redox reactions, but also for pumping ions across the chloroplast membrane. The energy stored in the ion gradient will be used later to power the chemical syntheses, which need both a reducing agent and additional energy. The ping-pong is done with electrons, not with photons. There are 2 photosystems, which absorb separately photons, using their energy to transport electrons against the potential gradient. The electrons pass through both photosystems in series, achieving a potential difference between the endpoints that is greater than what is required for splitting water. The potential difference over each photosystem is significantly smaller than corresponding to the energy of the absorbed photon, because only a fraction of the energy is used for electron transport against a potential gradient, while the rest is used for ion transport against a ion concentration gradient. Photosystem II contains manganese ions that are oxidized so strongly that they can oxidize the oxygen from water, converting it into free dioxygen. Photosystem I is able to make a strong reducing agent, to which the hydrogen remaining from water is bound.
- throwawaymaths 1y agoIIRC, PSI in the photosynthetic complex comes from purple bacteria, and PSII from green sulfur bacteria, so cyanos (and thus chloroplasts) kind of "already are" "using both". one presumes the option to use both pigments in the harvesting sense has been sampled evolutionarily.
- throwawaymaths 1y agooops i got them backwards, psII comes from purple.
- sampo 1y ago> Yes, but why? Scientific writing style is not always very good at highlighting the unknowns. "We don't know this" doesn't make very convincingly looking text, so people tend to avoid admitting it up front. But you are, of course, correct to ask. Like another comments said, this is an open question. One theory is, that while the algae floating in water were absorbing broad spectrum, the algae growing attached at the bottom of the water evolved to chlorophyll to capture whatever was left at the edges of the spectrum. And then later land-based plants would have evolved from the water plants that were already attaching themselves to the bottom. But then why are also the current ocean-floating algae green now? http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Biology/imgbio/plantblack.png http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Biology/imgbio/pl... Another theory is that a perfectly-absorbing leaf would somehow absorb too much energy and get overheated, and that it was better to absorb only part of the available light. None of these theories are fully convincing, so the question remains open.
- enopod_ 1y agoAccording to the article, at least todays retinal-based photosynthesis is anoxygenic and does not invole carbon fixation. At night, these cells metabolism stops. Chlorophyllic photosynthesis with attached carbon fixation allows the cell to build up starch during the day, which it breathes under the use of oxygen at night, so the cell remains active during the night. Looks like a big evolutionary advantage to me. Also, light is not the limiting factor for plant growth, it‘s usually water or nutrient availability.
- throwawaymaths 1y agocarbon fixation is a completely separate process. in principle you could hook up a sufficiently engineered cell to electrodes and do the carbon fixation part in the dark by supplying it with juice from the mains. accordingly there is no particular reason for purple photon assimilation to not be attached to carbon fixation... though i suppose as the electron energy levels dont quite match up it might be a schlep to get purples to make sugar.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
- slashdev 1y agoEvolution has had billions of years to improve on photosynthesis, but there still seems to be a lot left in the table. Could we engineer a more efficient photosynthesis?
- jmb99 1y ago> Could we engineer a more efficient photosynthesis? Yes! They’re called solar panels, and our best ones are about 4x more efficient than the most efficient photosynthesis processes in nature, afaik.
- dyauspitr 1y agoIt might be better to be exclude IR and UV so they don’t have to spend a lot of resources on cooling and anti mutagenic devices.
- throwawaymaths 1y agono, that doesn't make sense because the cells are being irradiated at those wavelengths anyways. Absorption in uv would if anything, shade the cell from uv induced damage.
- zahlman 1y ago> I wonder why no plant evolved to use both and make the more even efficient use of light. These plats would appear dark, maybe almost black. Many varieties of seaweed would seem to meet the description. Although I'm not sure that any of them are naturally anything like black without processing. Certainly some of them are brown, though.
- mr_toad 1y agoBrown kelp uses fucoxanthin to absorb green light. But they’re no longer considered to be plants.
- zzo38computer 1y ago> I wonder why no plant evolved to use both and make the more even efficient use of light. These plats would appear dark, maybe almost black. I have seen some black plants around where I live.
- anonymous_sorry 1y agoDoesn't mean they're photosynthesising with all frequencies of light though. Probably just pigment.
- scythe 1y agoI think that retinal might react with porphyrins. The former is a reactive aldehyde, the latter is a pyrrole derivative.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoI asked this same question last week and got some good answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630224 Three things that stood out to me: - Terrestrial plants evolved from green algae. There are other colors of photosynthetic algae. The advantage of absorbing red and blue may have been about avoiding competition with nearby red algae (which absorbs green), and about how blue light penetrates more deeply. - The trick is not capturing as much energy as possible, but rather capturing and routing energy to the reaction centers such that it neither overshoots nor undershoots the energy necessary for the reaction. This works better with two absorption peaks instead of one (more here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...). The absorption peaks of chlorophyll are both adequately distant from one another, and also more or less centered on the visible (i.e. most energetic) spectrum emitted by the sun. - The idea that the green-yellow region of the visible spectrum is most energetic is, if not a misconception, at least more complex that it seems (https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/light-and-radiometry/level-2/common-misconception https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/light-and-radiometry/l...).
- schobi 1y agoI agree with the overall discussion, but in the last link (Curtis Mobley Ocean Optics Book) the argument is broken. Mobley plotted two graphs of the solar irradiation and a black body fit. The only difference is supposed to be the x axis with a plot over frequency or wavelength. This is a non-linear mapping and a different shape is expected. But the result is that the peak irradiation level is at either 501nm or 882nm (when converted back). That can't be right. The labeling of the x axis does not change the maximum. What he meant to do was to plot either the solar irradiation in W m^-2 nm^-1 or as the number of photons. With lower energy photons (towards the red) the same irradiation level will consist of more photons. This shifts the maximum number of photons towards higher wavelengths. 880nm sounds plausible.
- bradrn 1y agoNo, see previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632819
- ryandamm 1y agoThis is actually even more puzzling than it seems, because the green part of the spectrum is the most energetic. I've read elsewhere that photosynthesis is partially limited by dealing with free radicals, and at peak light flux, many plants would be damaged by the monoatomic oxygen species that light-capturing complexes would create. Hence pigments that reflect some green light. Article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...
- dr_dshiv 1y agoMost of the green reflectance is an illusion because the human retina amplifies green light as much as 25× more than red (think of a green 5mw laser vs red). On the other hand, leaves do absorb green light: nearly 75% is absorbed, in contrast to 85% of non-green light. See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reflectance-spectra-of-green-black-solid-line-and-yellow-red-dashed-line-leaves-of_fig2_348057657 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reflectance-spectra-of-g...
- sssilver 1y agoWould osmin basil[1] fit the bill? [1] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sa=X&sca_esv=923321ced5d2d4ec&hl=hy-us&sxsrf=AE3TifME41vGllpEAR51R54o2epb3dpJkQ:1753601266698&udm=2&fbs=AIIjpHwbb2-ieowOjggjKyLTeGeVC_a9QIpnNb4YoV6EMtnxcmltgqylYBeMHjS02jnrlOh0243KdYlK7RN2hPQlIMRqRlSLQCBOm1QXes8q7KxsQvN3cMWBpQVRg68u9ios4MZFQMykgbAws0J5XFi6QpgEnEmzEAzlSqWMzp9xrbGnb2XY9ntkf5lcZvnvo_no7MxGHgutW9YaJl1_3X65CiBx726js1r68HJgw5rkwFovkMEP5ysRKxJSYqJIdFRstWwEIuDpldKsiKtv1khMAlZAaCxOFA&q=osmin+basil&ved=2ahUKEwjZ8tDkwdyOAxUfmmoFHX0MAn0QtKgLegQIEhAB&biw=393&bih=659&dpr=3 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sa=X&sca_esv=923...