Caine’s Classes

Remember that glycolysis will take place whether oxygen is present or not. It is the first set or reactions for both aerobic and anaerobic respiration.

If oxygen is present, and the cell is able to carry out the electron transport chain, these events will take place on the inner mitochondrial membrane. If oxygen should run out, the electrons get jammed in the electron transport chain, and the system switches over to lactic acid fermentation.

So the good times have come and gone. The party at the thylakoid was quite a “rager,” but now someone’s got to clean up all the mess. The place was littered with all this NADPH and ATP. So we’ll call in CO2 and they can all get together and make something useful out of this. Namely, glucose.

Remember, these are called: calvin cycle, dark reactions, light-independent reactions. All the same thing.

For those of you privy to the Light Reaction Party trying to raise ATP to benefit plant cells, here are the basic notes from the party in strictly digital form.

Light Reactions Animation

We will be having a brief exam next Monday that will cover:

• passive transport: diffusion, osmosis, facilitated diffusion, binding, conformational change, release
• active transport: ATP and ADP, Sodium & Potassium Pumps
• membrane structure and phospholipids

If I have to hear this anthem within the first day of teaching photosynthesis I might lose it. Thanks to fellow blogger Dan Meyer for pointing this out to all the science teachers and perhaps making chlorophyll fun (to everyone else)

Just a quick runthrough of the answers to today’s worksheet:

The enzyme we were discussing was bromelain and it comes from pineapples. If you make pineapple jell-o without first cooking the pineapple, the bromelain will break down its substrate. In this case the substrate would be the proteins in the gelatin. Cooking the pineapple will break down, or degrade, the bromelain, but maintain the taste of the pineapple. None of your jello samples set because there was bromelain in any form of the uncooked pineapple.

All classes will be having their first exams on friday.

The quiz scheduled for tomorrow, will be moved back one day. I want to review this idea using the newest way to diagram molecules, and don’t feel that many people are ready for these new diagrams yet.

Just in case you missed something in class or want to get back through the notes, here’s a copy of today’s presentation.