How Chlorophyll Makes Glucose Essay, Research Paper

Chlorophyll is the green pigment inside of plants that give them their characteristic green color. Chlorophyll absorbs violet -blue and orange- red light from the sun needed for photosynthesis. Composed mostly of carbon and hydrogen it is a necessary compound used in the complex process that allows for much of the human life on earth to take place. Photosynthesis is the procedure by which green plants use the energy of light to convert carbon dioxide and water into the simple sugar known as glucose. In the process it creates breathable oxygen and depletes poisonous carbon dioxide. Without chlorophyll there would not be enough oxygen to sustain life on earth, nor would the be much of the sweetness that you taste in today?s food. All this is thanks to chlorophyll and the product it creates called glucose which is made through photosynthesis.

The main place in which plant photosynthesis occurs is in green leaves and stems within specialized cell structures called chloroplasts in plants. Chloroplasts occur in most cells of a green plant that are exposed to light. One leaf which contains tens of thousands of cells can contain hundreds of thousands of chloroplast. Photosynthesis relies on flows of energy and electrons initiated by light energy. Photosynthesis begins when light strikes pigments in the leaf and excites their electrons. Next during photosynthesis carbon dioxide enters the stomata, a small opening inside the leaf which allows air to move in and out of the leaf. Chloroplasts in the cells of the plant convert solar energy into chemical energy contained in nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) and adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Meanwhile carbon dioxide and water from oxygen combine to form glucose a type of simple sugar. Fresh oxygen then leaves from the stomata and glucose dissolved by water is then carried throughout the plant transported by veins. The glucose is finally used as energy and food which allows the plant to grow and gives it it?s healthy green color.

Glucose is chiefly used a sweetening agent in the food processing industries. It is also used in tanning, in dye bathes in medicine tablets and it is a medicine used for treating dehydration. These are some of the products used by humans thanks to photosynthesis but this complicated process is essential to human and animal life. Therefore it should be protected and not be taken advantage of.