Organisms Concentrate Carbon Dioxide

photograph of green algae in dark blue water.

Biological Strategy

Green algae

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Capture, Absorb, or Filter Chemical Entities

Living systems often require chemical elements and chemical compounds, including complex sugars, proteins, and odor-making compounds, to perform critical activities. These compounds exist in various states–solid, liquid, and gas–and are ubiquitous in soil, water, and air. This requires that living systems not only have ways to capture, absorb, or filter them, but also ways to differentiate among them, selecting those that are valuable or harmful. For example, mangrove trees live with their roots in salty water and sediments. Various mangrove species have different strategies for removing salt from the water they take in so that their tissues can use the fresh water.

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Protists

Kingdom Protista (“the very first”): slime molds, giant kelp, red and brown algae

Protists are a numerous, diverse group of organisms that, in the simplest definition, are defined by what they are not. Protists are not plants, animals, fungi, or bacteria. Some protists, like Plasmodium, are harmful parasites that cause malaria. While many are small, obscure, and go unnoticed, others are important foodstuffs. The largest protist in the world, giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), is utilized by humans and marine species for food and shelter.

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Algae concentrate carbon dioxide to fix CO2 more efficiently, possibly using one or more HCO3- transporter proteins.

“The CO₂ concentrating mechanism (CCM) is a biological to low carbon dioxide concentrations in the environment. It is a mechanism which augments photosynthetic productivity in algal cells by increasing levels of inorganic carbon many times over the environmental concentration of carbon dioxide. The role of the CCM is to increase the concentration of CO₂ for Rubisco, the enzyme responsible for the initial fixation of CO₂.” (Moroney and Ynalvez 2007:1251)

[Note: This paper is a review of current state of the knowledge. See James Moroney’s website for more information: http://www.biology.lsu.edu/faculty_listings/fac_pages/jmoroney.html]

Last Updated August 18, 2016

References

Journal article

Proposed Carbon Dioxide Concentrating Mechanism in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

Eukaryotic Cell | 09/06/2007 | J. V. Moroney, R. A. Ynalvez

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