Chromophores Protect From Harmful UV

macro view of a pine tree branch needles in sunlight with a blurry background

Biological Strategy

Dwarf mountain pine

AskNature Team

Image: Kristin Marie Enns-Kavanagh / Flickr / CC BY NC - Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial

Capture, Absorb, or Filter Energy

Energy is naturally available in many forms, including kinetic, potential, thermal, elastic, radiant, chemical, and more. All living systems require energy to carry out their many activities, and have developed strategies appropriate to one or more of those forms. For example, some plants maximize their surface area available for capturing radiant energy from the sun while others have strategies to focus scattered light onto photosynthesizing areas.

Search this Function

Protect From Light

Access to sunlight is crucial to living systems because it’s the primary energy source for life. However, too much sunlight in the form of ultraviolet radiation (UV) can cause damage to living tissues. Therefore, living systems have strategies to filter out some or all UV radiation. For example, some plants that live in areas exposed to long periods of direct sunlight have reflective surfaces (such as white hairs or powder) that reflect UV light.

Search this Function

Conifers and Others (Pines, Spruce, Gingko)

Clade Gymnosperms (“naked seeds“): Conifers, cycads, Gingko, gnetophytes

There are approximately 1,000 known species of Gymnosperms. These include well known needle-bearing plants like pines, firs, and spruce, as well as some with broad leaves like the Gingko and the gnetophytes. Instead of flowers, gymnosperms produce unenclosed (“naked”)seeds exposed on the surface of cone scales. Economically, conifers make up 45 percent of the world’s lumber production. The first gymnosperms evolved over 390 million years ago in the Paleozoic Era and dominated landscapes for a quarter of a billion years before the evolution and diversification of flowering plants.

Search this Living System

Chromophores in cuticular wax of the dwarf mountain pine protect it from harmful UV by absorbing the most harmful UV-B and UV-A without lowering the received photosynthetically active radiation.

“Solar UV radiation is harmful to many biological systems, as well as all kind of technical applications. UV protective coatings are commonly utilised to shield many susceptible substances. In an attempt to learn from nature we demonstrate that for the Pinus mugo subsp. mugo (dwarf mountain pine) the cuticular wax layer provides UV protection. This biological coating contains chromophores that absorb UV radiation in such a way that it removes the most harmful UV-B and UV-A from the solar spectrum received by the plant and does not lower the received PAR (photosynthetically active radiation)…The principle of turning…harmful radiation into useful energy sets an example for new biological based coatings.” (Jacobs 2007:166)

AskNature