How Does Your Garden Grow? By Stephanie Wright



Our broccoli plant has gotten bigger and bigger each time we check on it. This means it is increasing its biomass. For a plant to get bigger, it needs to go through photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a process in which sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water are taken into a plant to produce glucose (and oxygen as a byproduct). Glucose is a simple sugar which is also a carbohydrate. Photosynthesis produces NADPH (Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate in the first part of the process (light independent reactions) to give energy to run the second part (Calvin Cycle), while cellular respiration produces ATP (Adenosine triphosphate). NADPH and ATP both provide energy for the cell to replicate in cell division. This is a process in which the cells of the plant reproduce, creating two cells instead of one. Cell division happens over and over, creating more biomass.


Phosphoglycerate kinase (PKG) and ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) are both important enzymes for the process of photosynthesis. If a plant needs more of these enzymes (or any enyzme, for that matter), a signal is sent to the nucleus of a cell in the plant and protein synthesis begins. A strand of DNA in the nucleus is unzipped and each base is matched with complementary RNA bases. This product is called mRNA, and once it is formed, it moves out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm. The pairs are read in groups of threes called codons. There are start and stop codons as well as regular codons. The mRNA has to go through a ribosome where it is paired with an anti-codon. Each anti-codon codes for a different amino acid. Amino acids are strung together with a peptide bond, starting with the start codon. This string forms a protein (enzyme). Once a stop codon is read, the protein stops growing. The string of protein is folded together to create the final product.

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