"How does your garden grow" Blog Post #6: Ethan Short

Today I have noticed how big our have grown. When we started this project in the beginning of the year and it was a tiny seed, now it is a fully grown and healthy plant. When I went outside to check out plant, I noticed that there was some biomass around the plants. I saw that there was a lot of sunlight, cause we live in California, and then I thought that photosynthesis obviously helped our plant to grow to the size that it is now. The sun created a sugar in our plants that helped to also grow bigger. I find it very interesting how photosynthesis and cellular respiration help each other. During photosynthesis, the plant needs carbon dioxide and water, both of which are released into the air during cellular respiration. During respiration, the plant needs oxygen and glucose, which are both produced through photosynthesis. In the stroma of a chloroplast, the plant cell structure responsible for photosynthesis, is the enzyme rubisco, which makes up half of the soluble protein of most leaves. A cell makes enzymes through protein synthesis. Protein synthesis can me made by transcription and translation. During transcription, the DNA of a gene serves as a template for complementary base-pairing, and an enzyme called RNA polymerase II catalyzes the formation of a pre mRNA molecule, which is then processed to form mature mRNA. The resulting mRNA is a single stranded copy of the gene, which next must be translated into a protein molecule. During translation, which is the second major step in gene expression, the mRNA is "red" according to the genetic code, which relates the DNA sequence to the amino acid sequence in proteins. Each group of three bases in mRNA constitutes a codon, and each codon specifies a particular amino acid. The mRNA sequence is then used as a template to assemble in order the chain of amino acids that form a protein.