Improving Photosythesis Disscussion Practice

Discussion 2 Guide: Improving Photosynthesis NAME: Wesley Beals Directions:  Read the article BEFORE answering the questions.  This assignment should be a “deep dive” into the material. It will take time to do. Part 1: Article Reading and Analysis 1. What are the advantages of using biofuels as a green energy source? The use of biofuel, if/when they were to be widely used and accepted, could help fill the gap that are being created by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels while helping society advance has a few drawbacks such as the limited nature of them and the environmental impact that the have. Biofuel’s can use the sun’s energy to give us fuel we can use and can help reduce carbon in the air and fix it back into a form that can be used. In addition, as the world’s demand of energy increases they can be used to increase the amount of power that people can draw on. 2. What are the three generations of biofuels? The three generations of biofuels are using crops for the first generation, grasses/ trees for the second generation, and finally third and the focus of the article is the third generation which is the focus on marine microalgae. 3. What advantage does marine microalgae have over other forms of biofuels? So primarily the benefits are that microalgae does not have to compete for resources such as water and space as compared to land plants and does not need fresh water to grow. This lack of competition for resources as well as the inherent ability to have oil in the algae as well as a higher efficiency rate than other plants show promising prospects at it’s use and become the next generation of fuel for the world. 4. What challenges are there involved in producing marine agal-derived biofuel? Despite all the positives for the use of algae, there are challenges that prevent this from becoming reality. Challenges include the production, isolation, and storage of these fuels are difficult engineering problems to solve. These problems however are nothing compare to all the inherent limits of photosynthesis as a whole. These drawbacks include the fact that the solar energy can be lost and mass culture phenomenon in algae. 5. Box 1 describes marine microalgae including their relationship to other organisms. Draw a tree of life using the descriptions provided in the box. (This is for practice because you will see evolutionary trees in Biol 191. You should do your best to draw the tree, but you WILL NOT lose points if it is not 100% accurate.) The scanned PDF document has the tree of life attached with this since I didn’t know how to do a drawing like what it was asking for in Word 6. Pages 616 – 619 discusses nine areas of photosynthesis and biofuel production that need to be addressed to make marine microalgae derived biofuels useful. Pick TWO of these and read through the rest of the article to find suggested solutions to those areas. Of the two challenges I decided to look into problem number 1 and problem number 7 Problem 1 with photosynthesis is the fact that not all light that is emitted by the sun is useable or absorbed by the photosynthetic pigments that are need to start photosynthesis. About 49% of the light emitted by the sun is usable for photosynthesis. The most focused on is the fact that light that falls into the extreme ranges of visible light are unable to be absorbed and are thus wasted by turning into heat or fluorescence. This challenge was almost hard to try and solve until the discovery of a new photosynthetic pigments that can absorb things like far red light and far into the green light which show allows for increased absorbing efficiency. Scientist want to try and use these and through biotechnology add them to the genome and create a more efficient absorption. Problem 7 is the fact that the algae uses some of the fixed carbon in order to survive and even though it is primarily species dependent and hard to measure, the estimated consumption is about 30% which is a further limit on the amount of fuel that is being extracted from the algae. The article does not directly talk about how this problem can be solved but by optimizing the rest of photosynthesis this 30% used can be satisfied allowing the organisms to live as well as being able to best provide fuel to us and that comes through fixing more carbon into a form other than carbon dioxide leading to greater efficiency despite the limits on it. 7. Compare Figure 1 to the diagrams of photosynthesis in your textbook. a. What is similar? There are actually quite a bit similar such as the use of separation of the light reactions and the light independent reactions. They both list major parts to each of the reaction so that we can pay more attention to the same metabolic pathways and list some of the major products in each reaction. b. What is different? There are way more differences. In the book, each step of the process is broken down into significant detail and that allows for a significant and greater understanding of the process as a whole. The article gives a very brief and simplified view of the system as is relates to biofuels and the major products and processes that lead to the creation of biofuel. In addition, this articles talks about extra things like lipid synthesis after discussing the light-independent reactions which again relates back into biofuel. The more general focus of the books diagram helps show helps create a better general understanding of the process whereas the article focuses on the more specific applications of the process. c. Pick one part of the figure, a vocab word or something else and describe it in more detail. The Calvin cycle is a part of the light-independent reactions of photosynthesis in which ATP and NADPH are used to convert and reduce carbon dioxide into sugars that are necessary for the survival of everything. It creates a cycle that allows it to continue even after product is formed. Without the Calvin cycle the sun-energy gained from the light reactions would be wasted and unable to be used by anyone but the plants that produce it. Part 2: AI investigation Directions: For this assignment compare two different AI chat bots. Use Google Bard and another AI (like ChatGPT) for references. You will compare and contrast the types of answers you get. You will also do simple fact checking of some answers. 8. Refer question 6 from part 1. Ask each AI system to find solutions to one of the nine areas of photosynthesis. Pick a different one from what you answered in question 6. Compare and contrast the two AI systems. a. Which was easier to use? Why? When it comes to ease of use both programs seem to have a very userfriendly interface as well as a very understandable way to ask the chatbots different questions. I would overall say that ChatGPT would probably be the easier program to use because of the fact that the sign up process is easier as compared to Google Bard which requires that you have a google account which can be a pain to set up sometimes. Overall though both program,s are easy to use and very easy to understand the answers to different questions. b. Which gave more accurate information? Explain your answer. Upon initial inspection, the more accurate information would probably from the Google Bard because of the fact that gives some very specific examples of specific research done about the efficiency of the carbon fixation process which is really interesting and also Bard has quick access to a Google search (as unreliable as those can be sometimes). ChatGPT has the limits on its knowledge to be at least from 2021 which can lead to some out of date results and questions. 9. The paper you read was from 2011. Ask each AI system to find research articles about this topic from 2012 to today. List the sources each AI provides. ChatGPT did not give me any articles at all and only gave tips on how research the topic on my own which was a little underwhelming to see. Bard on the other hand gave me a list and this is the response. Here is a list of research articles that talk about improving the efficiency of photosynthesis:  Improving Photosynthesis through Multidisciplinary Efforts: The Next Frontier of Photosynthesis Research (2022) by Zhu et al.  Research Progress in Improving Photosynthetic Efficiency (2022) by Wang et al.  Engineering photosynthesis for biofuel production (2021) by Oliver et al.  Improving photosynthesis: the next frontier for crop improvement (2021) by Ort et al.  Synthetic biology approaches for the improvement of photosynthesis (2020) by Zhu et al.  Strategies to improve photosynthetic efficiency in crop plants (2019) by Li et al.  Engineering plants for increased photosynthesis (2019) by Ort et al.  Improving photosynthesis for sustainable agriculture (2017) by Zhu et al.  Toward engineering artificial photosynthesis for solar fuels production (2016) by Nocera et al.  Redesigning photosynthesis for sustainable energy production (2015) by Ort et al.  Improving photosynthesis for crop productivity: A new research frontier (2015) by Zhu et al.  Engineering photosynthesis for biofuel production (2014) by Oliver et al. These articles discuss a variety of different approaches to improving the efficiency of photosynthesis, including genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and environmental engineering. They also discuss the potential benefits of improving photosynthesis, such as increasing crop yields and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. I hope this list is helpful. Please let me know if you have any other questions. a. Did they give the same sources or different ones? It was really interesting since ChatGPT did not give me any specific articles to help in the research of this topic; it only gave general tips about how to research the topic on my own. Google Bard actually gave me what I asked for and gave me a list that I can now look into. 10. Use CSN library tools to find FIVE of the articles provided by the AI. Were you able to find every source provided by the AI? Which sources, if any, could you not find a record of? Of the list of the 12 articles, I was able to only find 2 of them in the CSN library website and database. The two I was able to find were: Improving photosynthesis: the next frontier for crop improvement (2021) by Ort et al. and Research Progress in Improving Photosynthetic Efficiency (2022) by Wang et al. Everything else was not to be found by the CSN database. In order to find the other articles I needed to actually search in Google for the articles and found them all. There was not one that I couldn’t find after that and some seemed to be news articles or in databases I couldn’t access. Overall the results were not totally great. 11. Read the abstract of each article suggested by the AI system. a. For EACH article, state if you feel the article is related to the topic or if it does not relate to the topic. Briefly explain your reasoning. Of the two articles I could find in the CSN library both offer relevant information on how to improve photosynthesis but for the purpose of increasing crop yields and building resilience to climate change. The two article actually focus on ways to improve photosynthesis such as increasing light reaction absorption, improving the enzyme that catalyzes carbon fixation, and many others. Each explains what scientists are up to in each of their respective places and ways. The difference between the articles found and the original one is the fact that they focus on different aspects of what the improvement of photosynthesis will bring and thus focus on some of the minute intricacies of photosynthesis. 12. Repeat steps 9 – 11 again, this time change the way you ask the AI to provide articles. Does this give you better articles when you changed the search terms? Why or why not? No matter what I asked to ChatGPT, it would not give any articles and would say that because of the lack of an knowledge update since 2021 that it could not give list of article. It only repeated the tips and tricks to do the research for myself. This shows a very glaring flaw in the AI program, but it can be a helpful way to get some quick general information like Wikipedia. Bard was similarly stubborn and that was not varying up the articles that it was giving me. This probably stems from the fact that it is like google searching for something similar in that it would give similar or the same results to the same questions.