Bio 1
Bio 1
Botany
• Botany is the scientific study of plants.
• One group, the green algae similar to plants in biochemistry and cell
structure, but it also has many significant differences.
• Others exclude them, pointing out that some green algae have more
in common with the seaweeds known as red algae and brown algae
• Arbitrarily declaring that green algae are or are not plants solves
nothing;
• Cellulose Wall
• Producing starch as storing material
• Chloroplast that contain Chlorophyll b
• Thylakoid which stacked to form Grana in their chloroplasts
Scientific Method
• Until the 15th century, several methods for analyzing and explaining
the universe and its phenomena were used,
1. Source of information:
• Physical forces that control the world are constant through time and
are the same everywhere.
• Water has always been and always will be composed of hydrogen and
oxygen; gravity is the same now as it has been in the past.
4. Basis:
• Physicists occasionally still do this but biologists never use the term
“law.”
• Even though we have tens of thousands of observations that plants
are composed of cells, there is no “law that all plants are composed
of cells” instead we just treat this as a well supported theory.
• All the principles you learn in your chemistry or physics classes are
completely valid for plants.
2. Plants must have a means of storing and using information.
• As you may already know, genes are the primary means of storing this
information.
• 3. Plants reproduce, passing their genes and information on to their
descendants.
4. Genes and the information they contain, change.
• They must be adapted to the conditions in the area where they live. If
they are not adapted to that area’s conditions, they grow and
reproduce poorly or die prematurely.
6. Plants are highly integrated organisms.
• The structure and metabolism of one part have some impact on the
rest of the plant.
7. An individual plant is the temporary result of the interaction of genes
and environment.
• Because this step was so important and occurred with so many other
fundamental changes in cell metabolism, we classify all cells as
prokaryotes if they do not have nuclei (bacteria, cyanobacteria, and
archaeans) or as eukaryotes if they do have nuclei (all plants, animals,
fungi, and algae).
• By the time nuclei became established, evolution had produced
thousands of species of prokaryotes.
• Those with chloroplasts evolved into algae and plants; those without
evolved into protozoans, fungi, and animals.
• All organisms are classified into three large groups called domains:
• Like the algae, ferns are well-adapted to certain habitats and have not
changed much in 250 million years; they too have many relictual
features.
• Modern conifers are similar to early ones that arose about 320 million
years ago.
• The most recently evolved group consists of the flowering plants,
which originated about 100 to 120 million years ago with the
evolution of several features: flowers; broad, flat, simple leaves; and
wood that conducts water with little friction.
• The members of the aster family (sunflowers and daisies) have many
features that evolved recently from features present in ancestral
flowering plants.
• The terms “primitive” and “advanced” are avoided in that they imply
inferior and superior.
Diversity of Plant Adaptations
• The existence of 297,000 types of living plants means that there must
be at least 297,000 ways of being fit on today’s Earth.
Algae and Global Warming
• Purple bacteria and green bacteria are both rather rare, so they do
not remove very much carbon dioxide.
• Other bacteria, called “cyanobacteria,” are extremely common and
carry out a type of photosynthesis that is very similar to that of
plants.
• Unfortunately, all bacteria are tiny and their bodies are rather
delicate, so they break down quickly after they die and the carbon
atoms in their bodies are converted back into carbon dioxide.
• Algae, the close relatives of plants, are a group of organisms that are
important allies in our attempts to combat global warming.
• There are many types of algae (most are named by the color of their
pigments, such as red algae, green algae, brown algae, and so on),
and all carry out photosynthesis that is almost identical to that of
plants.
• This Shell is so dense that as soon as the coccoliths die, their bodies
sink to the bottom of the oceans.
• The cold temperatures there slow decay to such a degree that the
shells do not break down for thousands, even millions of years.
• Consequently, as these microscopic algae grow and then die, carbon
dioxide is removed from the atmosphere for very long times.