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Forwarded from Flowerdump
A Prairie Flower That Flourishes With Fire
Research over two decades on prairie land in western Minnesota shows how controlled burns encouraged a plant to generate seeds.

Purple coneflowers, also known as echinacea angustifolia, produce more seeds in years following fires, the new study shows, not just because there are fewer competitors for resources, but because a fire “also changes the mating opportunities,” said Stuart Wagenius, a conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Dr. Wagenius, who led the research, tracked a 40-hectare plot, or nearly 100 acres, of prairie land in Minnesota for 21 years as part of the Echinacea Project.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/science/fire-coneflowers-echinacea-pollination.html

http://echinaceaproject.org/
Photosynthesis is probably the most important biological process on Earth. Converting light into chemical energy stored as sugar, photosynthetic organisms can use the Sun's energy to power the chemical processes that keep them alive, as so all the other organisms that depend on them.
Photosynthesis is a two step process. The first step is formed by the light reactions. On this step, light is gathered and used to produce oxygen, hydrogen ions and a bit of temporary chemical energy in the form of ATP molecules.

The second step, formed by the so called dark reactions, takes the hydrogen, the ATP and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce sugar precursors in a cycle of chemical reactions called the Calvin Cycle.
In plant cells, photosyntheses happens inside special organelles called chloroplats. In the interior of the chloroplast, where there are systems of stacked flat membranous sacks called Thylakoids. On the surface of the thylakoids is located the biomolecular machinery responsable for gathering light.
Everything starts when photons of light hit the membrane of thylakoids , where the photosystems are located. The photosystems are molecular complexes that contain chlorophyll, which is responsable for absorbing the photons.