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Howard Griffiths (scientist)
Howard Griffiths is a physiological ecologist. He is Professor of Plant Ecology in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He formerly worked for the University of Dundee in the Department of Biological Sciences. He applies molecular biology techniques and physiology to investigate the regulation of photosynthesis and plant water-use efficiency. Research Griffiths' specializations include: * Responses to climate change, reflected by his membership of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Science (CCfCS). * Global food security, a University of Cambridge Research Theme. * Conservation and bioenergy crops, through his membership to the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. Griffiths has a particular interest in introducing the dynamics of plant processes without the need for time-lapse photography. His lectures demonstrate how the spatial segregation of photosystem 1 and photosystem 2 creates a highly dynamic system with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecophysiology
Ecophysiology (from Greek , ''oikos'', "house(hold)"; , ''physis'', "nature, origin"; and , '' -logia''), environmental physiology or physiological ecology is a biological discipline that studies the response of an organism's physiology to environmental conditions. It is closely related to comparative physiology and evolutionary physiology. Ernst Haeckel's coinage bionomy is sometimes employed as a synonym. Plants Plant ecophysiology is concerned largely with two topics: mechanisms (how plants sense and respond to environmental change) and scaling or integration (how the responses to highly variable conditions—for example, gradients from full sunlight to 95% shade within tree canopies—are coordinated with one another), and how their collective effect on plant growth and gas exchange can be understood on this basis. In many cases, animals are able to escape unfavourable and changing environmental factors such as heat, cold, drought or floods, while plants are unable to mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bioenergy
Biomass is plant-based material used as a fuel for heat or electricity production. It can be in the form of wood, wood residues, energy crops, agricultural residues, and waste from industry, farms, and households. Some people use the terms biomass and biofuel interchangeably, while others consider biofuel to be a ''liquid'' or ''gaseous'' fuel used for transportation, as defined by government authorities in the US and EU. The European Union's Joint Research Centre defines solid biofuel as raw or processed organic matter of biological origin used for energy, such as firewood, wood chips, and wood pellets. In 2019, biomass was used to produce 57 EJ (exajoules) of energy, compared to 190 EJ from crude oil, 168 EJ from coal, 144 EJ from natural gas, 30 EJ from nuclear, 15 EJ from hydropower, hydro and 13 EJ from wind power, wind, solar power, solar and geothermal energy, geothermal combined. Approximately 86% of modern bioenergy is used for heating applications, with 9% used for tra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents. Google Scholar uses a web crawler, or web robot, to identify files for inclusion in the search results. For content to be indexed in Google Scholar, it must meet certain specified criteria. An earlier statistical estimate published in PLOS One using a mark and recapture method estimated approximately 80–90% coverage of all articles published in English with an estimate of 100 million.''Trend Watch'' (2014) Nature 509(7501), 405 – discussing Madian Khabsa and C Lee Giles (2014''The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Gordon Jarvis
Paul Gordon Jarvis (1935 - 2013) was a leading ecologist and Professor of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Edinburgh from 1975 to 2001. Education Jarvis was educated at Oriel College, Oxford graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Botany. He went to graduate school at the University of Sheffield where he was awarded a PhD in 1960 for research on the growth and regeneration of Irish oak ''Quercus petraea''. Funded by a NATO scholarship, he moved to Uppsala University where he was awarded a second doctorate in plant physiology in 1963. Career and research In 1964 he moved to Australia, where he did postdoctoral research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He returned to the United Kingdom in 1966, where he worked at the University of Aberdeen for nine years until 1975, and then at the University of Edinburgh for twenty six years where he was a Professor until his retirement in 2001. Jarvis research interests we ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian National University
The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies and institutes. ANU is regarded as one of the world's leading universities, and is ranked as the number one university in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere by the 2022 QS World University Rankings and second in Australia in the ''Times Higher Education'' rankings. Compared to other universities in the world, it is ranked 27th by the 2022 QS World University Rankings, and equal 54th by the 2022 ''Times Higher Education''. In 2021, ANU is ranked 20th (1st in Australia) by the Global Employability University Ranking and Survey (GEURS). Established in 1946, ANU is the only university to have been created by the Parliament of Australia. It traces its origins to Canberra University College, which was established in 1929 and was integrated into ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
C4 Pathway
carbon fixation or the Hatch–Slack pathway is one of three known photosynthetic processes of carbon fixation in plants. It owes the names to the 1960's discovery by Marshall Davidson Hatch and Charles Roger Slack that some plants, when supplied with 14, incorporate the 14C label into four-carbon molecules first. fixation is an addition to the ancestral and more common carbon fixation. The main carboxylating enzyme in photosynthesis is called RuBisCO, which catalyses two distinct reactions using either (carboxylation) or oxygen (oxygenation) as a substrate. The latter process, oxygenation, gives rise to the wasteful process of photorespiration. photosynthesis reduces photorespiration by concentrating around RuBisCO. To ensure that RuBisCO works in an environment where there is a lot of carbon dioxide and very little oxygen, leaves generally differentiate two partially isolated compartments called mesophyll cells and bundle-sheath cells. is initially fixed in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crassulacean Acid Metabolism
Crassulacean acid metabolism, also known as CAM photosynthesis, is a carbon fixation pathway that evolved in some plants as an adaptation to arid conditions that allows a plant to photosynthesize during the day, but only exchange gases at night. In a plant using full CAM, the stomata in the leaves remain shut during the day to reduce evapotranspiration, but they open at night to collect carbon dioxide () and allow it to diffuse into the mesophyll cells. The is stored as four-carbon malic acid in vacuoles at night, and then in the daytime, the malate is transported to chloroplasts where it is converted back to , which is then used during photosynthesis. The pre-collected is concentrated around the enzyme RuBisCO, increasing photosynthetic efficiency. This mechanism of acid metabolism was first discovered in plants of the family Crassulaceae. Historical background Observations relating to CAM were first made by de Saussure in 1804 in his ''Recherches Chimiques sur la Végétatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CO2 Fixation
Biological carbon fixation or сarbon assimilation is the process by which inorganic carbon (particularly in the form of carbon dioxide) is converted to organic compounds by living organisms. The compounds are then used to store energy and as structure for other biomolecules. Carbon is primarily fixed through photosynthesis, but some organisms use a process called chemosynthesis in the absence of sunlight. Organisms that grow by fixing carbon are called autotrophs, which include photoautotrophs (which use sunlight), and lithoautotrophs (which use inorganic oxidation). Heterotrophs are not themselves capable of carbon fixation but are able to grow by consuming the carbon fixed by autotrophs or other heterotrophs. "Fixed carbon", "reduced carbon", and "organic carbon" may all be used interchangeably to refer to various organic compounds. Chemosynthesis is carbon fixation driven by chemical energy, rather than from sunlight. Sulfur- and hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria often use th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carbon Dioxide Concentrating Mechanism
Biological carbon fixation or сarbon assimilation is the process by which inorganic carbon (particularly in the form of carbon dioxide) is converted to organic compounds by living organisms. The compounds are then used to store energy and as structure for other biomolecules. Carbon is primarily fixed through photosynthesis, but some organisms use a process called chemosynthesis in the absence of sunlight. Organisms that grow by fixing carbon are called autotrophs, which include photoautotrophs (which use sunlight), and lithoautotrophs (which use inorganic oxidation). Heterotrophs are not themselves capable of carbon fixation but are able to grow by consuming the carbon fixed by autotrophs or other heterotrophs. "Fixed carbon", "reduced carbon", and "organic carbon" may all be used interchangeably to refer to various organic compounds. Chemosynthesis is carbon fixation driven by chemical energy, rather than from sunlight. Sulfur- and hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria often use th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RuBisCO
Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, commonly known by the abbreviations RuBisCo, rubisco, RuBPCase, or RuBPco, is an enzyme () involved in the first major step of carbon fixation, a process by which atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted by plants and other photosynthesis, photosynthetic organisms to fuel, energy-rich molecules such as glucose. In chemical terms, it catalysis, catalyzes the carboxylation of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate (also known as RuBP). It is probably the most abundant enzyme on Earth. Alternative carbon fixation pathways RuBisCO is important biology, biologically because it catalyzes the primary chemical reaction by which Total inorganic carbon, inorganic carbon enters the biosphere. While many autotrophic bacteria and archaea fix carbon via the reductive acetyl CoA Pathway, reductive acetyl CoA pathway, the 3-hydroxypropionate cycle, or the reverse Krebs cycle, these pathways are relatively small contributors to global carbon fixation compared t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thylakoid
Thylakoids are membrane-bound compartments inside chloroplasts and cyanobacteria. They are the site of the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis. Thylakoids consist of a thylakoid membrane surrounding a thylakoid lumen. Chloroplast thylakoids frequently form stacks of disks referred to as grana (singular: granum). Grana are connected by intergranal/stromal thylakoids, which join granum stacks together as a single functional compartment. In thylakoid membranes, chlorophyll pigments are found in packets called quantasomes. Each quantasome contains 230 to 250 chlorophyll molecules. Etymology The word ''Thylakoid'' comes from the Greek word ''thylakos'' or ''θύλακος'', meaning "sac" or "pouch". Thus, ''thylakoid'' means "sac-like" or "pouch-like". Structure Thylakoids are membrane-bound structures embedded in the chloroplast stroma. A stack of thylakoids is called a granum and resembles a stack of coins. Membrane The thylakoid membrane is the site of the ligh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Photosynthetic Reaction Centre
A photosynthetic reaction center is a complex of several proteins, pigments and other co-factors that together execute the primary energy conversion reactions of photosynthesis. Molecular excitations, either originating directly from sunlight or transferred as excitation energy via light-harvesting antenna systems, give rise to electron transfer reactions along the path of a series of protein-bound co-factors. These co-factors are light-absorbing molecules (also named chromophores or pigments) such as chlorophyll and pheophytin, as well as quinones. The energy of the photon is used to excite an electron of a pigment. The free energy created is then used, via a chain of nearby electron acceptors, for a transfer of hydrogen atoms (as protons and electrons) from H2O or hydrogen sulfide towards carbon dioxide, eventually producing glucose. These electron transfer steps ultimately result in the conversion of the energy of photons to chemical energy. Transforming light energy into ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
