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Blog Post #6

1) My groups plant has been getting larger and growing over the course of the past few months. It has been preforming the process of photosynthesis to add biomass and the amount of resources available to the plant. Photosynthesis is one of the main ways a plant comes to thrive in it's environment, this is when plants take sunlight to convert CO2 into O2 and high energy sugar. Despite the fact that it's winter right now and the sun isn't out as much, our plants have still been able to take the available light energy and use it in photosynthesis. Another big process that is occurring to allow our plants to grow is known as Mitosis. Mitosis is the replication and division of cells inside a living organism to allow that organism to grow and stay healthy. Mitosis is also vital to allowing space for new cells to take up a spot in the organism, as the organisms grow and mature they'll need more cells to keep up with the rapid advances in size and functions. This is made especially clear as without this function, new cells wouldn't be created and the existing cells would die off much faster than if there were also newer cells along side it. Cellular Respiration is another occurrence that keeps our plant growing and healthy. During Cellular Respiration, the plant can create energy such as NADP+ and ATP, these are high energy sugars that keep a plant functioning. ATP is responsible for transporting the necessary energy for cellular metabolic activities while NADP+ is relevant for moving energized elections around the plant during photosynthesis.

2) Our plants would make these enzymes through a long process of translation and transcription where it starts with a strand of DNA and ends with the creation of a proteins. This happens because most enzymes are also proteins, if the cell were to make a protein, most the time the cells are making an enzyme too. To start this process, helicase unzips the double stranded structure of the DNA while RNA polymerase follows shortly behind and adds RNA nucleotides onto a single stranded replication of the initial DNA sequence. This RNA strand stores the exact same genetic information that the DNA had except the RNA, is expendable to the cell while DNA is not. Because of this, it's the RNA that takes the trip to the outside of the nucleus to the Ribosome, this is where the protein is created. The Ribosome will begin to read the mRNA in sequences of three nucleotides called codons, this begins when the Ribosome finds the "start" codon (AUG) which relays to the Ribosome to start building the protein. Each codon represents a different Amino Acid which are the building blocks of all proteins, a specialized RNA known as tRNA (Transfer RNA) brings all the necessary Amino Acids to the Ribosome where it's then shaped into the correct protein that the RNA strand has been coded for. The specific proteins that our plant will want to create for photosynthesis are known as Phosphoglycerate kinase (PKG) and ribulose 1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco). Through the processes earlier explained, the plants would easily be able to tell that it needs RKG and Rubisco for photosynthesis, after realizing that it needs these two enzymes the process would begin to create the needed enzymes.

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