Biology Form 4 Muhammad Hafizul Helmi Bin Talib 4 Budi Encik Ahmad Azlan Bin Abdul Aziz

Chloroplast
Chloroplasts are organelles found in plant cells and

other eukaryotic organisms that conduct photosynthesis. Chloroplasts capture light energy to conserve free energy in the form of ATP and reduce NADP to NADPH through a complex set of processes called photosynthesis.

Image of chloroplast

Evolutionary origins of chloroplast

Chloroplasts are one of the many different types of

organelles in the plant cell. In that they derive from an endosymbiotic event, chloroplasts are similar to mitochondria, but chloroplasts are found only in plants and protista. The chloroplast is surrounded by a double-layered composite membrane with an intermembrane space; further, it has reticulations, or many infoldings, filling the inner spaces. The chloroplast has its own DNA, which codes for redox proteins involved in electron transport in photosynthesis; this is termed the plastome.

 In green plants, chloroplasts are surrounded by

two lipid-bilayer membranes. In some algae ,chloroplasts seem to have evolved through a secondary event of endosymbiosis, in which a eukaryotic cell engulfed a second eukaryotic cell containing chloroplasts, forming chloroplasts with three or four membrane layers. In some cases, such secondary endosymbionts may have themselves been engulfed by still other eukaryotes, thus forming tertiary endosymbionts. In the alga Chlorella, there is only one chloroplast, which is bell-shaped.

Structures
Chloroplasts are observable as flat discs usually 2 to 10

micrometers in diameter and 1 micrometer thick. In land plants, they are, in general, 5 m in diameter and 2.3 m thick. The chloroplast is contained by an envelope that consists of an inner and an outer phospholipid membrane. Between these two layers is the intermembrane space. A typical parenchyma cell contains about 10 to 100 chloroplasts.

Ultrastructure
Chloroplast ultrastructure: 1. outer membrane 2. intermembrane space 3. inner membrane (1+2+3: envelope) 4. stroma (aqueous fluid) 5. thylakoid lumen (inside of thylakoid) 6. thylakoid membrane 7. granum (stack of thylakoids) 8. thylakoid (lamella) 9. starch 10. ribosome 11. plastidial DNA 12. plastoglobule (drop of lipids)

What is photosynthesis?
chemical reaction in which carbon dioxide and water

is changed to glucose by the action of chlorophyll and with sunlight energy.

 Photosynthesis is performed by plants, green algae, and plant

like protists such as the Euglena. To photosynthesize, a plant, or other heterotrophic organism, needs Carbon dioxide, water, light and chlorophyll. Plants store food as starch. Thus, after producing glucose, the plant transforms glucose into starch, which is an insoluble polysaccharide, to be stored. Glucose goes down the stem towards the roots in the Phloem vessels in the vascular bundles,while water goes upwards the stem from the roots through the xylem vessels in the vascular bundles. To find out if the plant has performed photosynthesis, you must do a starch test on a leaf. If the leaf has starch, then it must have photosynthesized but if the leaf has no starch, that means the plant has not photosynthesized and it used up all the starch it had in the leaf to stay alive.

Definition of process
Photosynthesis is the process of converting light

energy to chemical energy and storing it in the bonds of sugar. This process occurs in plants and some algae (Kingdom Protista). Plants need only light energy, CO2, and H2O to make sugar. The process of photosynthesis takes place in the chloroplasts, specifically usingchlorophyll, the green pigment involved in photosynthesis. Photosynthesis takes place primarily in plant leaves, and little to none occurs in stems, etc.

 The parts of a typical leaf include the upper and

lower epidermis, the mesophyll, the vascular bundle(s) (veins), and the stomates. The upper and lower epidermal cells do not have chloroplasts, thus photosynthesis does not occur there. They serve primarily as protection for the rest of the leaf. The stomates are holes which occur primarily in the lower epidermis and are for air exchange: they let CO2 in and O2 out. The vascular bundles or veins in a leaf are part of the plant's transportation system, moving water and nutrients around the plant as needed. The mesophyll cells have chloroplasts and this is where photosynthesis occurs.

Equations

Figure of process

Light reactions
In the light reactions, one molecule of the pigment

chlorophyll absorbs one proton and loses one electron. This electron is passed to a modified form of chlorophyll called pheophytin, which passes the electron to a quinone molecule, allowing the start of a flow of electrons down anelectron transport chain that leads to the ultimate reduction of NADP to NADPH. This creates a proton gradient across the chloroplast membrane; its dissipation is used by ATP synthase for the concomitant synthesis of ATP.

 The chlorophyll molecule regains the lost electron from

a water molecule through a process called photolysis, which releases a dioxygen (O2) molecule. The overall equation for the light-dependent reactions under the conditions of noncyclic electron flow in green plants is:
2 H2O + 2 NADP+ + 3 ADP + 3 Pi + light 2 NADPH + 2H+ + 3 ATP + O2

Not all wavelengths of light can support photosynthesis. The

photosynthetic action spectrum depends on the type of accessory pigments present.

 For example, in green plants, the action

spectrum resembles the absorption spectrum for chlorophylls and carotenoids with peaks for violet-blue and red light. In red algae, the action spectrum overlaps with the absorption spectrum of phycobilins for red blue-green light, which allows these algae to grow in deeper waters that filter out the longer wavelengths used by green plants. The non-absorbed part of the light spectrum is what gives photosynthetic organisms their color (e.g., green plants, red algae, purple bacteria) and is the least effective forphotosynthesis in the respective organisms.

Figure of light reaction

THE END

~HF_HL~