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Very interesting discovery

I just got word of a newly discovered organism that probably ranks among the most strange in the world.....

A PHOTOSYNTHETIC organism that lives thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean, in the deep dark abyss where not one ray of sunlight penetrates!

You may ask...."how is that possible?"  Think about it for a bit then click on the link below to find the answer!

Science news

This is truely a testament to the resiliency and diversity of life on this planet!

Perhaps one day a carnivorous plant will be found there too!
 
Hum, this one slipped under the radar here and I haven't been checking my news lately... Anyhoo, thanks for the link. I suppose that in the big picture it makes sense: just fillin' the niche. Hydrothermal vents are the site of quite a few of chemosynthetic organisms, so I suppose this makes sense. Still quite neet though, thanks for sharing.
 
And though it wasn't addressed in the press article or primary literature, a REALLY awesome horticultural application would be to introduce the gene(s) responsible for the light-absorbing molecule into a plant.

The wavelength and intensity of light emitted by the vent is likely to be very different from typical sunlight, so introducing such a molecule into a plant's repetoire of light-capturing molecules may significantly increase it's adaptibility to low and poor quality light.

One day this may enable people to grow CPs in very dim areas WITHOUT artificial lighting! Unbridled optimism....maybe. But stranger things have been done.
 
Chlorophyll can work with red and blue light.  It doesn't do anything with green and actually wastes some of the blue taking it down to the lower energy red.  According to the article, a small fraction of the spectrum emitted at the vent makes it into the red and that's what the photosynthetic bacteria are using.  So that's no different from other photosynthetic organisms.  There must be a number of other physiologic adaptations, but it doesn't sound like the photosynthetic mechanism is unique.  I'll do a search later and see what mechanism the green sulfur bacteria use.

I have photosynthetic mechanisms on my mind this morning.  Now that we have hot weather, all the C4 weeds have suddenly run amok in the garden.  I weeded from 6:30-9:00 this morning and C4 weeds like pigweed and purslane that were invisible two weeks ago are leaving my C3 garden plants in their dust.  But the C4 corn is beginning to zoom too and the portulacas are suddenly spreading.
 
I'm willing to bet sunlight produces a much wider range of wavelenghts than the hydrothermic vents, and more intense too. The sun produces radio waves and gamma rays and everything in between. There are also plants that use different pigments to photosynthesize. While chlorophyll is green and uses other wavelenths of light, other pigments are red, yellow, brown, etc. and use other wavelenths of light... that's why some plants are totally red, yellow, etc. and why leaves turn those colors in autumn when chlorophyll is gone.
I'm assuming that different pigments are better than others and that's why most plants are green...
so I don't see why we would need the bacteria... there are plants now that can grow in lower light levels so why not use say a wintergreen gene and put it in CPs to make them grow in shade like wintergreen do?

of course, If you have noticed, most shade plants are much darker green than full sun plants, and they grow slower... so the CPs would probably change their color and growing habits.... they'd be in a low nutrient medium AND low light levels... making them grow painfully slow.

but of course, that's just my opinion :p
nature is too complex to predict. It's kind of funny because I was discussing this in another forum. They kill the predators and I was asking them if it had any effect and why, when you consider the big picture, it MAY actually be worse... but like this, it's all speculation.
 
Plants have many pigments and use other wavelengths for various things.  Read about the red/far-red and blue light systems here - http://sunflower.bio.indiana.edu/~rhanga....h1.html.  If other wavelengths didn't matter, grow lights would be red.  But the only pigment that actually photosynthesizes is chlorophyll, with the exception of what's in that green sulfur bacteria.

What's cool about the red/far-red is that if you don't expose lettuce seeds to light, some will germinate.  If you expose them to red light, almost all will germinate (assuming everything else is OK).  If you expose them to far-red, you'll get almost no germination.  If you expose them to red again, they'll all germinate. You can turn them on and off like a light switch by changing the light.  It's a cool experiment every intro plant physiology class does.
 
I asked a while ago about how totally red/yellow/etc plants photosynthesize if they're not green... they told me that other pigments also photosynthesized. how DO they photosynthesize then? I doubt the really tiny amount of chlorophyll can make all the food for the plant. and as is the case with red dragon VFTs and others, they don't only have to make enough food for the plant to stay alive and grow but also to store enough for the months of winter and then the rapid growth of spring.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]other pigments are red, yellow, brown, etc. and use other wavelenths of light...

Carotenoids (carotenes and xanthophylls.)
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[b said:
Quote[/b] ]...so I don't see why we would need the bacteria... there are plants now that can grow in lower light levels so why not use say a wintergreen gene and put it in CPs to make them grow in shade like wintergreen do?
Well, the simple fact of it is that it'd be a pain in the rear to isolate and extract the sections (who guarentees it's just one gene?) coding for shady requirements from a wintergreen. First off, a wintergreen has a big genome, it would have to be sequences and all of the locales of the genes controlling what light levels the plant grows best in would have to be located, isolated, and replicated. It'd be quite difficult even if you were only looking at the chloroplast's DNA.
Bacteria on the other hand are beauties for things like this. Working with a smaller genome, it'd be easier to isolate what you're looking for and you have the benefit of operons as well... Oh the joys of DNA.
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Gee, you know, this makes me think- it really has been a while since I did any of that... lol So if I muck up on some aspect or left something out, feel free to let me know. But, alpha, some very nice points, as usual. ( I'm a biology buff, too
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  • #10
ah... I should have guessed
I'm not very good with all the molecular biology, chemistry, physics, etc.
 
  • #11
I don't have any direct experience, but I've heard the "black" S. alatas grow much more slowly than others.  If true, one possible explanation is that all that pigment captures light that would otherwise support photosynthesis.  Lots of plants use red pigments to absorb excess light and protect chlorophyll.  That's why many turn red in strong light and why many red clones stay green in lesser light.  But the red pigments don't photosynthesize.
 
  • #12
after some research, I found out that
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Many leaves contain other pigments as well, and while these pigments can't photosynthesize as chlorophyll can, some of them are able to transfer the light energy they capture to the chlorophyll
http://www.sciam.com/askexpe....588F2D7
so while they don't directly photosynthesize, they do help to photosynthesize by absorbing the energy necessary. They do also protect from free radicals and other stuff.
very interesting... It's all falling into place now.
 
  • #13
[b said:
Quote[/b] ] If true, one possible explanation is that all that pigment captures light that would otherwise support photosynthesis.

The pigments within plants are photosynthetic. Well, there are some that are for protection but I don't think that having useless pigments sucking up all the useable light is responsible for them growing slow. Protective pigments still aid the photosynthetic process.

Edit: Well, now that I've read the article, it's all really said their anyway.
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Oh well. The real fun starts when you start to analyze the photosystems- the first one is photosystem II the 2nd one is photosystem I because they're numbered in order of discovery.
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Oi.
 
  • #14
Hi guys,

Herenorthere, you're correct, the wavelengths absorbed by the bacterium are within the red.....that's what I get for just reading the abstract!
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Est, I would agree that bacterial transformation is the way to go. They have small and manipulable genomes, resilient, take up little space and are very fast growing. Though there are fewer instances of bacterial genes being inserted into plant or animal genomes, it has been done. And I can't begin to count the number of times non-bacterial genes have been inserted into bacterial genomes for the rapid production of a valuable protein!

And guys, I think we can all agree with theAlphawolf that most plant chlorophylls do not function alone but in concert with other pigments (e.g., xanthophylls) as part of light-harvesting complexes of those annoying photosystems (I and II). So, the xanthophylls are important players in photosythesis.

And I would argue that technically, chlorophyll does not photosynthesize; photosythesis is a complex series of reactions geared toward the production of glucose using light as energy. The sum of all these reactions--from the harvesting of light to fixing of CO2 to H20--is photosynthesis. Without all those mysterious cofactors (NADH), etc, chorophyll wouldn't get too far!
 
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