This prevents the formation of free radicals, which can damage proteins and cellular components of the plant. In fact, plants are known to quickly adapt to changes in sunlight intensity.įor example, only about 30 per cent of available sunlight is converted into sugar extremely sunny conditions, and the rest is dispelled as heat. But they don’t use all the sunlight they encounter. How do plants protect themselves from sunlight?Įnergy from sunlight is used by plants to help produce sugar molecules, that store the energy for use by the plant at a later time. “That’s the simplest proposal, but no one’s been able to find this photophysical pathway until now.” “This is the first direct observation of chlorophyll-to-carotenoid energy transfer in the light-harvesting complex of green plants,” said senior author Dr Gabriela Schlau-Cohen at MIT in a statement. They found that excess energy from the sunlight, which is absorbed by chlorophyll - the pigment that also gives plants their green colour - is transferred to other pigments called carotenoids, and then released. The team of researchers from the Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US and the University of Pavia and the University of Verona in Italy used a highly sensitive type of spectroscopy to uncover the possible mechanism that plants can use to dissipate excess sunlight as heat. Now, scientists have revealed one of the possible mechanisms to achieve this feat, reported on 10 March in Nature Communications (1). How they achieve this is a topic that scientists have debated for decades. So, to protect themselves, plants avoid so-called photodamage by expelling excess light as heat. Sunlight is required for photosynthesis, but too much sunlight can damage plants.
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