Which part of the living system did you change?
Labs / Biology
Photosynthesis
Sunlight and CO₂ pour into a chloroplast, where they are woven into glucose and puffs of O₂ float away. Slide the light and CO₂ levels up and down, and watch the oxygen rate speed up — until it stalls on whichever ingredient is running short.
Labs / Biology / Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis
Sunlight and CO₂ pour into a chloroplast, where they are woven into glucose and puffs of O₂ float away. Slide the light and CO₂ levels up and down, and watch the oxygen rate speed up — until it stalls on whichever ingredient is running short.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Living systems are connected and constantly changing. This model makes one biological process visible so you can test how its parts affect one another.
Explore
Try the model
O₂ 0.0 µmol/slimiting —glucose 0
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- With CO₂ low, keep cranking up the light. Why does the O₂ rate stop climbing?
- When the readout says the reaction is "light" limited, does adding more CO₂ do anything?
- Can you find a setting where neither factor is limiting — where the rate is "saturated"?
- Drag the sun to the far corner. Does moving the light source change how fast glucose piles up?
- Starting from deep shade, which raises the O₂ rate faster: a little more light, or a lot more CO₂?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Explain the process as a chain: a change happens, the system responds, and that response affects what happens next. Use an observation from the model as evidence.
Check
Before you leave
How did the system respond?
How would you explain that response?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.