Plants: Making Air Easier to Breathe

We’ve all heard on the news or learned in elementary schools about the mass deforestation going on all over the world. But have you ever stopped to wonder, why exactly is this bad? Why do we need plants and trees at all?

It turns out, plants are efficient in resupplying the air with oxygen, while removing carbon dioxide! The former, being essential to our survival, and the latter being a gas involved in global warming.

an inside look into plants

So how exactly do they do this? In turns out that inside the plants’ cells there are special machinery capable of splitting water (H2O). This machinery is called an electron transport chain (ETC).

Using sunlight, the ETC extracts energy from the water – leading to the generation of oxygen as a “waste” product. Ironically what’s considered waste for them is gold in terms of survival for us.

When it comes to removing carbon dioxide they have another set of machinery. For the plant, carbon dioxide is like food: they trap the carbon dioxide and convert them into carbohydrates and other nutrients.

rubisco – the single bad life-essential solution

A key piece of machinery in this conversion is RuBisCo – an enzyme. An enzyme is a molecule that speeds up biochemical reactions, and surprisingly RuBisCo is one of the least efficient in existence (think of RuBisCo as a bike and other enzymes as the newest Tesla).

So you might be thinking, if RuBisCo is such a bad enzyme, can’t scientists just make a better version of RuBisCo? This would increase crop yields, and be good for the environment! Well, scientists have tried and failed … it seems like this is the only bad solution to a complex problem. Along with the ability to split water at ease (which scientists also can’t do), this is why plants are biochemical miracles.

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