Biology - Nutrition (Plants)

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After talking about Animal nutrition in my last post, you will want to ask? What about plants, do they have to worry about what they take in? Sure. Plants also need nutrients for their growth. So let's look at how plant nutrition takes place.

Just like any other living organism, they need energy and nutrients to function properly. The nutrient materials can be gotten from food, which is then converted to energy. Plants are living things, so will need the energy to ensure that the life process goes smoothly. Plants have cells and tissues, which grow in size. Plants are the most important actors in the ecosystem, so the need of synthesizing food to have the kind of nutrients needed.

Nutrition in plants

Nutrition in plants is called the autotrophic mode of nutrition, which means plants can produce their food. Plants use inorganic substances to produce organic substances while using energy from the sun and carbon dioxide. These energy sources for plants are non-living things.

Plants have the green color pigment called chlorophyll, which is put together with the above factors to produce carbohydrates. Plants use carbohydrates as energy, and any excess is stored as a reserve which is then used later. Like I said above, plant nutrition falls under Autotrophic. There are two types: Photo Autotrophic(using sunlight as energy sources), and Chemo Autotrophic (using chemicals as energy sources).

Photo autotrophic (Photosynthesis)

Here plants need raw materials to make their food, some of these raw materials are carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight. Water is gotten from the soil through the plant's roots, Sunlight is an energy source from the sun. Now we have two raw materials pending carbon dioxide, which is a gas.

Plant leaves have what we call stomata, these are openings on the plant leaves which are surrounded by guard cells. Plants use these stomata for gaseous exchange, which now gives the possibility for plants to get in carbon dioxide and send out oxygen. The carbon dioxide that gets in through the stomatal completes the requirements for photosynthesis.

^{Chemical Reaction (equation) during Photosynthesis}

Sunlight is a trap by the leaves using the disc-shaped organelles present in mesophyll cells of the Chloroplast in chlorophyll. The sunlight energy is converted to chemical energy, which uses the carbon dioxide gotten through the stoma to split the water molecules. The result of this process is carbohydrates and Oxygen which is a byproduct.

Well, we have seen how plants make the nutrients (carbohydrates) needed for their growth from simple inorganic substances. The raw material available, is water from the soil, sunlight from the sun, and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Thanks for reading.