I’m sure that how rice evolves into corn is an interesting bit of esoteric trivia for botanists

I’m sure it would be very interesting to discover evidence for rice turning into corn, given that it hasn’t (to my knowledge; please correct me if I’m wrong) been proposed by any actual botanists–the idea is that they’re both descended from the same grass, which may or may not have resembled one of them more than the other.

re plants adapted to the arctic

You sure asked the right person about that. Scubaredneck is a botanist in Alaska.

The trick in the arctic is to grow fast and reproduce quickly. The growing season is very short but very intense due to long days. As a result, both C3 and C4 plants have found niches, although I believe that C3 plants tend to dominate. I don’t think any specific photosynthetic adaptations have been identified for arctic regions, however. That might make for a nice research project…

The Scubaredneck

“Both C4 and CAM are specific adaptations to specific environmental situations: C4 to hot climates and CAM to arid climates.”

What adaptations for photosynthesis is found in artic regions?

I’m not sure what happened. A third party service “Akismet” is the first reviewer of all comments and trackbacks. Proprietary software of theirs examines comments and looks for telltale signs of being spam (keywords, suspicious sources, too many links, etc.). If they think it might be spam they return it with a special tag and it’s placed in a holding cell waiting for a blog adminstrator to make the final determination. For whatever reason the comment in question of yours came back from Akismet marked as spam. I wish I could tell you why but I don’t know why.

C3 is definitely the ancestral state of photosynthesis and C4 and CAM are definitely the more derived pathways. Both C4 and CAM are specific adaptations to specific environmental situations: C4 to hot climates and CAM to arid climates. In both cases, C3 plants don’t do well.

Particularly interesting are plants like pineapples, which are facultative CAM plants. When conditions are dry, they do CAM photosynthesis and then do C3 when conditions are wet enough.

The Scubaredneck

It is possible that it is C4 that represents the original state of photosynthesis and that C3 is the result of change in environmental pressures?

Much like all other degredations to the genome, what we see is that optimal design(not perfect) is dragged down by less optimal environmental changes?

And how bacteria became bacteria in the first place. I’ll settle for a cell, any cell.

C4 plants are more efficient then C3 plants under high heat and light conditions.

From http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/css/330/two/

How is one more perfect then the other?