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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Regulate Atmospheric Chemical/Gas Composition

Metabolic processes exchange resources with all phases of matter–solids, liquids, or gases. For example, aerobic organisms reduce the concentration of atmospheric oxygen gas and increase the concentration of carbon dioxide gas, while green plants and algae replenish those atmospheric stores through photosynthesis.

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Plants

Phylum Plantae (“plants”): Angiosperms, gymnosperms, ferns, hornworts, liverworts, mosses, and green algae

Plants have evolved by using special structures within their cells to harness energy directly from sunlight. There are currently over 350,000 known species of plants which include angiosperms (flowering trees and plants), gymnosperms (conifers, Gingkos, and others), ferns, hornworts, liverworts, mosses, and green algae. While most get energy through the process of photosynthesis, some are partially carnivores, feeding on the bodies of insects, and others are plant parasites, feeding entirely off of other plants. Plants reproduce through fruits, seeds, spores, and even asexually. They evolved approximately 500 million years ago and can now be found on every continent worldwide.

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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 | September 6, 2007 | J. V. Moroney, R. A. Ynalvez

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