Claire's Seed Story

When Claire first started this project, she hated gardening. However, her views changed once she found out how fun it actually was. Seeing the plants grow overtime, and knowing why made her look at gardening in a new light. Of course, her friends (aka Ariana and I) also helped with this. When we were taking pictures of our full-grown plants just a week ago, we had a great time. We were talking about how much we all sucked at gardening. We took pictures of our plants, but we ended up taking selfies so much that the people in the classrooms started looking at us. All in all Claire's experiences with this project has changed her ideas on gardening.

For the Love of Collard

The collard that started out as a small seed..

...has now grown into a full grown collard!

These Collards have grown so much over these 3 months. From seed to full-grown organism, this plant has grown a lot of biomass, but how? It couldn't have just been created. 

 The seed starts out as a small collection of cells (stem cells) and they duplicate and duplicate again and again and they keep on doing this until there are thousands upon thousands of different cells which do different jobs for the collard.  How do these cells duplicate? Well, through a process known as mitosis, the cell divides in an extremely intricate process which happens in a matter of seconds. Basically, all of the DNA in the nucleus (thats 6 whole feet end to end) is systematically unwound, split up, and copied by an enzyme called DNA polymerase. Then the nucleus splits up, one half of the chromosomes in one half and the other in the other half. Then the rest of the cell splits up and, voilà, you have two daughter cells.

With that question answered, one more springs to mind; where does the cell get the energy to do mitosis hundreds of times every second?

Well, when a cell is not dividing, it goes into a phase called interphase, which is not a stage in in mitosis, but rather a stage where the cell builds up the energy to divide again. The process in which the cell makes energy in plants is called photosynthesis, which takes place in the chloroplast of a plant cell. The way cells store energy is by turning ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate) into ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). They do this by consuming light, water and carbon dioxide and spitting out oxygen, which the plant breathes out, and sugars, which the cell uses and converts to ATP.  (The way animals produce energy is almost identical, except they consume oxygen and sugars, and give off carbon dioxide, ATP, which it uses, and water, which it also uses).  

Another interesting point is that the mechanisms which make photosynthesis are enzymes (Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase [PEPC] and ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase [Rubisco]), which are proteins, which are made of amino acids, which are made by ribosomes, which use RNA for directions, which are all duplicates of our friend, DNA.

So we just went around a big circle of... collard?

Watching grass grow doesn't seem so boring now, does it?