Light And Rate Of Photosynthesis Essay

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Investigating the Link Between Wavelength of Light and Rate of Photosynthesis

PROBLEM =======

I have been asked to investigate the link between wavelength of light and rate of photosynthesis.

HYPOTHESIS ==========

I predict that the order of best absorption in a plat to produce more bubbles will be blue, yellow, orange, red and finally green. I predict this because blue has the shortest wavelength which produces the most energy and there is slightly higher absorption in the blue region by the plant. The red has the largest wavelength in the visible spectrum which produces the least energy. The reason why green is at the bottom of the list of absorption in a plant is because …show more content…

They absorb light energy and enable it to be converted into chemical energy which is used by the plants to make glucose and oxygen from carbon dioxide and water. Plants appear to be different colours because of the dominant pigments they contain. These pigments absorb some colours of light and reflect others, for example, the green chlorophylls absorb light from the blue-violet and the red regions of the visible spectrum and reflect green light. This is why plants which contain mostly chlorophylls appear green. Other pigments found in green plants, the yellow, orange and red carotenoids which absorb light only from the blue-violet region of the spectrum, are mostly masked by the more dominant chlorophyll.

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We can see how different wavelengths of light affect photosynthesis by looking at action spectra. An action spectrum relates the rate of photosynthesis to the wavelength of light being received by a plant. For green plants, including algae, the action spectrum shows that …show more content…

Photosynthetic activity is lowest in green light since green light is hardly absorbed at all by these pigments. The relative absorption of light of different wavelengths by pigments can be shown in absorption spectra. Action and absorption spectra correspond quite closely. Wavelengths of light which are more readily absorbed by photosynthetic pigments cause higher levels of photosynthesis.

Some plants live in conditions where the spectral quality of light may be different to that received by plants living on the land. Algae which live in surface waters tend to be green and contain more or less the same pigments as land plants since they exist under similar light conditions. Algae living lower in the water receive more blue light than red because red light has a relatively long wavelength and cannot penetrate water as well as blue light which has a shorter wavelength and more energy than red light.

Brown algae, which may be found deeper in the water than green algae, have combinations of pigments which enable them to

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