True/False, WHY? Aerobic respiration occurs in animals but not plants, which make ATP only by photosynthesis?
Apr.27, 2010 in
Aerobic Respiration
True/False AND WHY? Aerobic respiration occurs in animals but not plants, which make ATP only by photosynthesis.
is this true or false and why, please give as much detail as possible
April 27th, 2010 at 6:29 am
true. few details needed. aerobic burns oxygen and released carbon dioxide; plants do the opposite.
April 27th, 2010 at 7:09 am
This is absolutely false.
Many people think that because plants do photosynthesis, which turns carbon dioxide and water into simple sugars and oxygen, they must NOT do aerobic respiration, which is sort of the opposite process. This is absolutely not true…it is a MYTH. Plant cells have mitochondria and therefore have the capacity to perform aerobic respiration.
When a plant performs photosynthesis, it is essentially capturing the energy in sunlight and storing it in the form of sugars. I’ll restate this to emphasize its importance: the most important product of photosynthesis is sugar, NOT ATP. ATP is produced during part of photosynthesis, but it is used in a subsequent stage so there is not sufficient ATP production during photosynthesis to keep the plant alive.
So the plant stores sunlight energy in sugars during photosynthesis; what happens next? When the plant needs energy to carry out some of its metabolic processes, it must convert the stored energy in sugars into ATP. It does so through aerobic respiration, just like animal cells do. The big difference between energy metabolism in animals vs plants is that animals lack the ability to capture energy from sunlight; therefore, they must obtain it by eating other organisms.
I hope that helps. Good luck!