How Does You Garden Grow by Clare Robke
Our broccoli plant is growing speedily! It is clearly adding biomass everyday, seeing as it has transformed before our eyes from a seedling into a large plant with many leaves and flowers that will soon become the broccoli we know and love (or hate) to eat. The processes of cell division, photosynthesis, and cellular respiration are what work together inside our plant to allow it to grow.
Cell division, also known as mitosis, is pretty much how our plant adds to its total mass. Mitosis is a process undergone in eukaryotic cells that results in two daughter cells being produced from a single parent cell, with each of them having the same number and kind of chromosomes as the parent nucleus. Through the stages of interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase/cytokinesis, a cell duplicates everything inside it, the chromosomes line up along a central axis and are pulled apart, and eventually splits down the middle into two new cells. Mitosis happens over and over and adds new cells constantly, which allows all life forms, including our broccoli, to grow exponentially.
In order to perform this cell division and grow bigger, plants need the energy gained from both cellular respiration and photosynthesis. During cellular respiration, a glucose molecule is being broken into CO2 and water. All the reactions that occur during this process help make the products of ATP and carbon dioxide, which plants use to make their sugar/food. The ATP molecule has bonds that break and release energy for the cell. Contrary to cellular respiration, photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. Photosynthesis also uses light energy from the Sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into the simple sugar glucose that the plant uses in cellular respiration. The energy produced from these two processes is used in the aforementioned mitosis/cell division to break down the nuclear membrane and condense the chromosomes during prophase, move the chromosomes during anaphase, and even rebuild the nuclear membranes and build a new cell wall with cell membranes between the new nuclei generated during telophase.
Phosphoglycerate kinase (PKG) and ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) are two important enzymes used in 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 by an enzyme specific to this job, DNA Polymerase, and each base is matched with complementary RNA bases. This creates a strand of mRNA. This mRNA is then sent out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm, where the strand is translated into amino acids. This process, called translation, starts when a ribosome reads the start codon "AUG." The ribosome reads the codons in groups of three and pairs each one up with an anti-codon that codes for a specific amino acid. Eventually, the ribosome reads a stop codon and we are left with a sequence of amino acids strung together with a peptide bond. The sequence forms a protein. Many proteins are condensed together to create the final product.
Cell division, also known as mitosis, is pretty much how our plant adds to its total mass. Mitosis is a process undergone in eukaryotic cells that results in two daughter cells being produced from a single parent cell, with each of them having the same number and kind of chromosomes as the parent nucleus. Through the stages of interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase/cytokinesis, a cell duplicates everything inside it, the chromosomes line up along a central axis and are pulled apart, and eventually splits down the middle into two new cells. Mitosis happens over and over and adds new cells constantly, which allows all life forms, including our broccoli, to grow exponentially.
In order to perform this cell division and grow bigger, plants need the energy gained from both cellular respiration and photosynthesis. During cellular respiration, a glucose molecule is being broken into CO2 and water. All the reactions that occur during this process help make the products of ATP and carbon dioxide, which plants use to make their sugar/food. The ATP molecule has bonds that break and release energy for the cell. Contrary to cellular respiration, photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. Photosynthesis also uses light energy from the Sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into the simple sugar glucose that the plant uses in cellular respiration. The energy produced from these two processes is used in the aforementioned mitosis/cell division to break down the nuclear membrane and condense the chromosomes during prophase, move the chromosomes during anaphase, and even rebuild the nuclear membranes and build a new cell wall with cell membranes between the new nuclei generated during telophase.
Phosphoglycerate kinase (PKG) and ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) are two important enzymes used in 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 by an enzyme specific to this job, DNA Polymerase, and each base is matched with complementary RNA bases. This creates a strand of mRNA. This mRNA is then sent out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm, where the strand is translated into amino acids. This process, called translation, starts when a ribosome reads the start codon "AUG." The ribosome reads the codons in groups of three and pairs each one up with an anti-codon that codes for a specific amino acid. Eventually, the ribosome reads a stop codon and we are left with a sequence of amino acids strung together with a peptide bond. The sequence forms a protein. Many proteins are condensed together to create the final product.
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