Photosynthesis in Nature: A New Look
Photosynthesis is a fundamental process on the Earth’s surface that can convert the sunlight energy to chemical energy that can be used by essentially all forms all life (Komissarov 2003 ; Krauß 2003 ). The outstanding English chemist Joseph Priestley in
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Khan M. G. Mostofa, Cong-qiang Liu, Xiangliang Pan, Takahito Yoshioka, Davide Vione, Daisuke Minakata, Kunshan Gao, Hiroshi Sakugawa and Gennady G. Komissarov
1 Introduction Photosynthesis is a fundamental process on the Earth’s surface that can convert the sunlight energy to chemical energy that can be used by essentially all forms all life (Komissarov 2003; Krauß 2003). The outstanding English chemist Joseph Priestley K. M. G. Mostofa (*) · C. Liu State Key Laboratory of Environmental Geochemistry, Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guiyang 550002, China e-mail: [email protected] X. L. Pan Xinjiang Key Laboratory of Water Cycle and Utilization in Arid Zone, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, People’s Republic of China T. Yoshioka Field Science Education and Research Center, Kyoto University, Kitashirakawa Oiwake-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan D. Vione Dipartimento Chim Analit, University Turin, I-10125 Turin, Italy Centro Interdipartimentale NatRisk, I-10095 Grugliasco, (TO), Italy D. Minakata School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Georgia Institute of Technology, 828 West Peachtree Street, Suite 320, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA K. Gao State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, China H. Sakugawa Graduate School of Biosphere Science, Department of Environmental Dynamics and Management, Hiroshima University, 1-7-1, Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8521, Japan G. G. Komissarov Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 117977, Russia
K. M. G. Mostofa et al. (eds.), Photobiogeochemistry of Organic Matter, Environmental Science and Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32223-5_7, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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in 1771 and 1772 firstly hypothesised on photosynthesis that plants can restore to the air whatever breathing animals and burning candles remove. Jan Ingenhousz in 1779 showed that light is essential to the plant process that somehow purifies air fouled by candles or animals. Based on the experiments, he concluded that plants are dependent on light and their green parts for nutrients and energy. The experiments conducted by J. Senebier and N. Th. de Saussure revealed that the initial substances of photosynthesis are carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) (de Saussure 1804; Bay 1931). It has been shown by de Saussure (1804) that H2O is a reactant in photosynthesis. The CO2 cleavage hypothesis readily accounted for the deceptively simple overall photosynthesis equation (CO2 + H2O + hυ → CH2O + O2) (de Saussure 1804). The C:2H:O proportion in the reaction made people assumed that carbon from the photodecomposition of CO2 can recombine with the elements of water. In 1905 the British scientist F. Blackmann discovered that photosynthesis consists of a light reaction, which is rapid, and a slower dark reaction (Blackman 1905; Blackman and Matthaei 1905). In 192
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