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Re:Green Machines
Friday, July 30, 2010
There are numbers of other pigments that also is present in some plants.Some of these, such as Arytenoids and Xanthophylls.They don't replace the chlorophyll,but they can help it do its job more better. These other pigments absorb light in different areas of the light spectrum than chlorophyll does,thus widening the range over which plants can extract energy from light. They don't directly do the same things that chlorophyll can do, but they can give the energy they extract from light to chlorophyll molecules, helping them do their work. Usually, these accessory pigments are yellow, orange or red and this color gets masked by the green of the chlorophyll, but some you can see the leaves in different colour.One very important function of some of these secondary pigments is to act as a form of protection for chlorophyll molecules against the free radicals which can be formed within the cells under strong light. In cases where this happens, the red or violet color of the secondary pigment can visually overpower the green color of the chlorophyll and the plant will appear red or purple. A lot of the plants we grow in aquariums have colored leaves because they were breed that way or the color is due to a (non-harmful) virus.There is a plant virus which can infect some species of plants and cause the leaves to lose the ability to produce chlorophyll in certain areas. This is seen most often in Hygrophila.
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