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Surely it would be even more beneficial for plants to be black instead of red or green, from an energy absorption point of view. And Solar cells are indeed pretty dark. But, as Rory indicated, higher energy photons will only produce heat. This is because the chemical reactions powered by photosynthesis require a only certain amount of energy, and any ...

I believe it is because of a trade off between absorbing a wide range of photons and not absorbing too much heat. Certainly this is a reason why leaves are not black - the enzymes in photosynthesis as it stands would be denatured by the excess heat that would be gained. This may go some of the way towards explaining why green is reflected rather than red ...

I think @mbq has covered the frequency question better than I can. There is at least one modern example of this kind of new organelle formation. Aphids have a deep, intracellular endosymbiont Buchnera involving some genome transfer that has developed in the last 200 million years. There are many articles about this topic (eg: Nature from 2000), and it ...

According to "Resolution of distinct rotational substeps by submillisecond kinetic analysis of F1-ATPase" (Yasuda et al., Nature, 2001), ATPase rotates at 130 revolutions per second when saturated with ATP.

Well, it seems quite obvious that it was not a single I-eat-you-but-you-survived act but rather a convergence of endosymbiotic and host species into a greater and greater cooperation. Of course this leaves a question if there was one or more species of endosymbionts involved. Mitochondria are a very primeval story forced by the oxygen catastrophe, so it is ...

It depends of what you call endosymbiosis. In the sense of mutualistic interaction between host cell and intracellular organism, it also include Rhizobium bacteria and Fabaceae plants, some Cnidaria and algea in their cells, and even some micorrhizal fungi that invade into plants cells. But parasitic interactions are also sometimes call symbiosis, as ...

There is quite a fun article here which discusses the colours of hypothetical plants on planets around other stars. Stars are classified by their spectral type which is dictated by their surface temperatures. The Sun's is relatively hot, and it's spectral energy distribution peaks in the green region of the spectrum. However the majority of stars in the ...

There are two factors at play here. First is the balance between how much energy a plant can collect and how much it can use. It is not a problem of too much heat, but too many electrons. If it were a question of heat, a number of flowers selected for their black pigmentation would have their petals cooked off. ;) If a plant does not have enough water, is ...