CAM photosynthesis
Sign in to saveAlso known as CAM, GO:0009761, Crassulacean Acid Metabolism
metabolic process
Research
1,312 papers- Ecophysiology of constitutive and facultative CAM photosynthesis.Journal of experimental botany · 2019
- Shifting photosynthesis between the fast and slow lane: Facultative CAM and water-deficit stress.Journal of plant physiology · 2024
- Defining Mechanisms of C(3) to CAM Photosynthesis Transition toward Enhancing Crop Stress Resilience.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023
- CAM photosynthesis: the acid test.The New phytologist · 2022
- Bringing CAM photosynthesis to the table: Paving the way for resilient and productive agricultural systems in a changing climate.Plant communications · 2024
via PubMed
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- biological process
- Subclass of
- photosynthesis, dark reaction
Show 4 more facts
- Commons category
- CAM cycle
- exact match
- purl.obolibrary.org/obo/GO_0009761
- facet of
- Crassulaceae
- uses
- RuBisCO
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~13 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The pineapple is an example of a CAM plant. Crassulacean acid metabolism, also known as CAM photosynthesis, is a carbon fixation pathway that evolved in some plants as an adaptation to arid conditions that allows a plant to photosynthesize during the day, but only exchange gases at night. In a plant using full CAM, the stomata in the leaves remain shut during the day to reduce evapotranspiration, but they open at night to collect carbon dioxide (CO2) and allow it to diffuse into the mesophyll cells. The CO2 is stored as four-carbon malic acid in vacuoles at night, and then in the daytime, the malate is transported to chloroplasts where it is converted back to CO2, which is then used during photosynthesis. The pre-collected CO2 is concentrated around the enzyme RuBisCO, increasing photosynthetic efficiency. This mechanism of acid metabolism was first discovered in plants of the family Crassulaceae.
Historical background
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “CAM photosynthesis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.