Q.What is the role of radioactive isotopes in the mechanism of photosynthesis in plants ?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Photosynthesising algae/plants were fed radioactive , and tracking the labelled carbon through short, timed exposures (using chromatography and autoradiography) revealed the sequence of intermediate compounds of the Calvin cycle.
Before radioactive tracers were used, the detailed chemical pathway by which is fixed and converted into carbohydrate during the 'dark reactions' of photosynthesis was unknown. Melvin Calvin and coworkers supplied algae (Chlorella) with containing the radioactive isotope and allowed photosynthesis to proceed for progressively shorter, controlled time intervals before rapidly killing the cells (to freeze the chemical state) and extracting the cell contents. Two-dimensional paper chromatography combined with autoradiography (exposing X-ray film to the chromatogram) then revealed exactly which compounds had become radioactively labelled at each time point. By using very short exposure times, the very first compound to become labelled was identified as 3-phosphoglyceric acid (3-PGA), a 3-carbon compound, establishing that atmospheric is first fix …
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