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That's an important question, Jon. Not only does it affect your experiment, and growing our food and plants in nature, some biofuels now and in the future depend on how fast photosynthesis runs. One potential way to get fuel with less pollution is to grow it by capturing light engery into fuel energy with photosynthesis (such as using algae, or switchgrass).
One question is whether you are asking about how to increase the rate of photosynthesis in a given piece of leaf (like your experiment) by speeding it up. The other question is how to increase it per plant.
Across a whole plant, you can increase photosynthesis with all the same ways that you do by making photosynthesis faster for each piece of leaf, but also lots more ways. Since I don't think this is what you're asking, I'll be brief: pack more chloroplasts into a piece of leaf so it has more 'machinery' to do photosynthesis; capture more light with more leaves or leaves better aligned to the sun (some leaves even move to follow the sun: plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu ___________________); get more resources to the parts of the plant that needs them; etc.
To speed up photosynthesis per cell, give it more of whatever it needs! In both biology, chemistry and business, there is a concept of a rate limiting step. That is the 'bottleneck' or slowest step in a process that limits the rate of the whole process. Picture checking out of a grocery store with a huge amount of groceries. Someone has to unload the cart. Someone scans the groceries. Someone has to get the right number of bags open. Someone else puts them in bags. It doesn't matter how fast the unloader goes if the scanner is slower. Adding extra people unloading groceries from the cart won't make checkout any faster if the scanner is the rate-limiting step. Adding an extra scanner won't speed things up overall if all the groceries fill up the space in front of the bagger who cannot move any faster. The best way to speed things up is to invest in the rate limiting step, not the other places, whether in business or photosynthesis.
Well, in photosynthesis, how do you think this might apply? Adding more chloroplasts & more Rubisco to a cell would help. That takes nutrients, so keeping the plant well fed can help. Keeping the inputs 'well stocked' helps too -- photosynthesis cannot happen without the 'materials the factory needs.' What inputs do you think are needed for photosythesis to happen? _____, ______, ____ at least, and to a lesser degree I think ADP and NADP+ and other stuff that run the mechanism.
The easiest way to speed it up is to make sure that those resources are all available, not only in the plant but in the cell itself. Resources in the roots or air don't help the chloroplasts. That brings us to one last challenge: sometimes what is lacking is limited by something else in a trade-off. Nutrients need to be dissolved in water and come up in the xylem, so even if the cell needed more phosphate, it might be water that is really limiting to carry the phosphate. More importantly, to get ________ into the cells, the stomata have to be open, and that costs _________. Thus, increased ________ in the air won't help if there isn't enough _________ available to the plant to leave its stomata open longer! That's one reason why climate change sounds like it could help plants, but usually won't.
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1. extended relevance of answer about a great question! 2. fill in the blanks to challenge student thinking and encourage involvement!
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