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Plants and Excess Glucose

Updated: Mar 11

Plants make more glucose (C6H12O2) than they can immediately use. All photosynthesizing plants on Earth store about 10 GtC per year in the form of cellulose and starches. Cellulose and starch are made from glucose. When plants store glucose as cellulose and starches, they are building their biomass.

Look at the equations for photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Think about these questions:

  • What is carbon used for in the plant?

  • If all photosynthesizing plants on Earth can store 10 GtC per year, could plants be a good solution for reducing carbon in the atmosphere? Why or why not?

  • What kinds of information or data would you want to see to figure out if they could be a good solution?


Credits

Climate Education Pathways

Copyright © 2025 BSCS Science Learning. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

The development of this material was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL 2100808. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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