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Q.What is the role of radioactive isotopes in the mechanism of photosynthesis in plants ?

Tamil Nadu DgeTamil Nadu HSC (DGE) Board 2019Subjective· 2mImportance★★★★★
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Photosynthesising algae/plants were fed radioactive 14CO2^{14}CO_2, 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 CO2CO_2 is fixed and converted into carbohydrate during the 'dark reactions' of photosynthesis was unknown. Melvin Calvin and coworkers supplied algae (Chlorella) with CO2CO_2 containing the radioactive isotope 14C^{14}C 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 CO2CO_2 is first fix …

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