Welcome to Gen 3
“One of the things that makes science very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination … it’s very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like.”
Richard Feynman
We’ve had some pretty crazy ideas over the past few years. We started Rooted Leaf Agritech with a firmly-held belief that how fertilizer was being done wasn’t good enough – and to be frank, back then we weren’t exactly sure what we were getting ourselves into, we just knew that we had some solid ideas worth exploring.
One of them was the idea that we need to frame carbon as a macronutrient for plants, and treat it like all of the elements found in typical mineral fertilizers. We needed to make a carbon-based fertilizer – an idea born from the realization that conventional agricultural wisdom completely overlooks the role that carbon plays in crop nutrition.
Plants accumulate enormous amounts of carbon relative to other elements, and yet no fertilizer manufacturers seem focused on it. Everywhere we looked, we saw that conventional fertilizers contain zero carbon – not just one or two fertilizers, but all of them.
Thousands of different bags, hundreds of different formulations, manufactured & sold all around the world to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, all missing what is literally the most important element. The single element which defines all plant expression.
How did everybody else miss something as important as carbon? Actually, before we get into that, let’s first make sure they really did miss the importance of carbon in plant nutrition, because this all sounds too good to be true.
We can’t possibly be the only ones who realized the square peg fits into the square hole … can we?
Where Is The Carbon?
To be fair, there are a limited number of conventional fertilizers which contain carbon – urea/urea-formaldehyde mixtures, amino-polycarboxylates (synthetic chelating agents like the infamous EDTA), and a few others… but “containing carbon” is fundamentally different than “carbon-based,” and the notion that carbon is lacking from conventional fertilizers is still true in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The proof that conventional fertilizers are not carbon-based is in their chemistry. Conventional fertilizers contain N, P, K, and over a dozen other elements, combined in various forms together – magnesium nitrate, potassium phosphate, calcium chloride, zinc sulfate, and so on – but where’s the carbon?
It’s not there, and that’s a problem.
When combined together, the two dozen or so elements found in conventional fertilizers make up less than 10% of what a plant is. Carbon alone can easily make up 50% of the total biomass, and in many cases far exceed that, approaching 80 to 90% as is the case with cannabinoids – and pretty much all of the mono-, sesqui-, and di-terpenes in nature.
Yet the two dozen or so elements which make up a minority of plant biomass are the ones which make up the majority of elements fed to plants in conventional fertilizers. Doesn’t something seem off about that?
Let’s daisy-chain a few thoughts together:
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- The concentration of CO₂ in the air is roughly 420 ppm
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- Of that 420 ppm, 115 ppm is pure carbon (the remaining 305 ppm is oxygen)
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- The atmospheric carbon load is therefore approximately 115 ppm
115 ppm of carbon and yet conventional fertilizers can easily feed over 150 ppm of nitrogen, 50 ppm of phosphorus, 200 ppm of potassium, and so on. By the time we’re done adding up all of the elements which make up a minority of the plant biomass, we can be looking at well over 500 ppm of minor elements being stacked on only 115 ppm of carbon.
Those ratios are backwards.
Plants put out compounds which are mostly carbon, and yet conventional fertilizers put in compounds which are mostly not carbon, effectively force-feeding elements that make up a minority of plant biomass. This is the conventional approach, which excludes carbon altogether from fertilizer programs.
It’s worth looking closely at what kinds of molecules plants create through photosynthesis:
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- Nutrition – 50 to 90% carbon – these would be fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, which all human life depends on;
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- Medicine – 70 to 90% carbon – pharmacologically-active compounds like taxol, digitalis, quinine, cannabinoids, and others;
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- Textiles – 50 to 70% carbon – fibers and saps for making fabric, ink, paper, tannins for leather, and quite literally the basis of human civilization.
There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of different compounds produced by plants, all of which are mostly carbon by weight. Knowing this, doesn’t it seem like a really good idea to figure out how to treat carbon like a macronutrient? Especially if the goal for farmers is to have healthy soils and stellar crops, which produce high yields and high quality even in adverse growing conditions or when disease pressures are high.
All of the markers for quality are measuring compounds which are mostly carbon by weight anyways – it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about brix in strawberries, alpha acids in hops, fermentable sugars in wine grapes, starches in potatoes, anthocyanins in berries, or anything else for that matter, including the molecules which help plants cope with environmental stressors and biological disease pressures.
It’s all made mostly of carbon.
Six years ago, we dove head-first into the realization that carbon was the key to everything. Since then, we’ve gotten pretty good at feeding carbon to plants, and along the way we’ve learned to unpack what all that means – how exactly carbon can be fed, what it does within the plants, how it interacts with other fertilizer elements, and ultimately how carbon behaves as a macronutrient that allows for greater genetic potentials to be expressed in all plants – for food, for medicine, and for industrial uses.
With the first and second generations of our product line, we learned a lot about how our technology influences the underlying physics of electron transport, proton gradients, and carbon metabolism. Now, the evolution of our technology brings an entirely new perspective into focus.
Plants are Quantum-Scale Particle Decelerators
Gen 3 Rooted Leaf is born from the realization that there is a cross-section between quantum physics and plant biochemistry which can be leveraged to benefit plant growth in profound ways.
The refinements to our technology are substantial, representing a full-send leap into exploring entirely new concepts, and building out understandings in completely unchartered territories, both of which continue to set us apart as the most advanced fertilizer manufacturing company in the world.
It’d be worthwhile to explain how we went from a simple, caveman-like question (“is carbon really a macronutrient for plants?”) to invoking a discussion of plants as quantum-scale particle decelerators. That kind of leap of knowledge doesn’t just happen overnight, and the best way to explain is to share not what we think of plants, but rather how we think of them.
To be clear – when we say that plants are quantum-scale particle decelerators, we are not suggesting that a photon is literally frozen, this is just a useful metaphor that captures complex details of photochemistry very well. Photon energy is sequentially converted into chemical energy via a series of charge separation and recombination reactions which are driven by quantum-scale phenomena that are not biological in origin – and this is what we’ll be unpacking in this article.
It’s a lot, but it starts with a simple premise.
Plants reconfigure matter in space using the power of the sun, and over time they create the basis for all complex terrestrial biology, including humans. C3, C4, and CAM plants have a miraculous ability to create something – actually, a seemingly-infinite number of things – out of nothing. The way they interact with photons has resulted in the terraforming of this special rock floating in space, into a hospitable environment with a stable atmosphere that supports all complex lifeforms.
For us, this is mind-blowing stuff.
When we say “something out of nothing” – we don’t literally mean nothing, again it’s just a helpful way to understand what we’ll be laying out. A photon is still something, but it has no mass and yet can be used to create biomass.
In many ways, plants have evolved remarkably sophisticated processes which leverage phenomena that are common, seemingly universal, and occur passively in nature. The most obvious example of this is that plants use the power of the sun to achieve photosynthesis. Less obvious examples would be how plants exploit the fact that CO₂ dissolves in H₂O with no energy input required, and how H₂O molecules can reconfigure their molecular bonds in the presence of sunlight.
These are passive phenomena because they do not require energy expenditure from plants in order to achieve. Plants do not spend energy on forcing the sun to shine, they do not spend energy on dissolving CO₂ into H₂O, and they do not spend energy on reconfiguring the bonds of H₂O into H₃O₂ – all of these phenomena occur naturally, and plants have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to leverage them.
The most important phenomenon which plants have mastered over time is the capturing of light-energy, and conventional wisdom would have us believe that photons come crashing into chlorophyll pigments like marbles being chaotically flung from the sun, but the reality is much more complex, and in our perspective it seems wise to look at how plants might prepare certain pathways in advance, resulting in a pulling of light-energy down specific transport chains.
In order to better understand how plants can be soft-wired in advance for photosynthesis, we need to take a look at some of the mechanisms involved. Of course, photosynthesis and electron transport are inexplicably linked, as is the generation of protons and ATP, all of which we will go through – but there’s another layer to this quantum puzzle that we need to dive into: water chemistry.
Structured Water as the Deceleration Matrix
It used to be thought that water was a passive solvent, but modern analytical techniques make it difficult to deny water a unique role – pardon the pun, but water plays a fluid role in plant biology. Rather than simply being a passive solvent, water is a dynamic medium that is capable of inducing charge separation – with no biology required. This special quality is leveraged by plants in the form of ultra-thin sheets of structured water molecules.
Let’s first establish something about water: it’s more mysterious than just two hydrogens and one oxygen.
Ice, in the presence of sunlight, can undergo a phase shift and become liquid water. It’s still the same elements making up both solid and liquid water molecules, but the space between the atoms shrinks. When water freezes, hydrogen bonds arrange the water molecules into open hexagonal lattices, causing ice to occupy more volume than liquid water. This is why ice floats, and why it collapses inward as it melts. The sun can melt ice (solid) into water (liquid) but it can also cause water to turn into vapor (gas), and so we have three phase shifts occurring which are powered entirely by the sun, and not disputed at all.
The controversial bit is that; beyond the solid, liquid, and gas phases of water, there is a fourth phase of water. This fourth phase of water is based on the same fundamental logic, and we’ll refer to it as “structured water” for now although “exclusion zone” water has also been used more recently, thanks to the monumental work done by Dr. Gerald Pollack, his colleagues, and a small number of brilliant predecessors throughout history.
Most people think of water molecules as H₂O, and the various phases as varying configurations of those same molecules, but the so-called fourth phase of water has a different formula altogether: H₃O₂. Essentially; when the conditions are correct, two molecules of H₂O come together, the bonds play a game of musical chairs, and an H₃O₂ molecule is formed, with a proton being released and excluded from the bond network.
The fact that water, in the presence of the sun, can induce charge separation intrigues us greatly because of the implications it has for energy production. This charge-separation occurs naturally, and is utilized by plants to help create billions of tons of biomass.
Clearly, plants have figured out something profound about sunlight, water, and infinite energy. By looking more closely, it starts to become clear that plants are significantly more advanced in their ability to work with water than we have given them credit for.
Hydration Shells and Water Blankets
Traditionally, water molecules were looked at as something like passive cocoons that wrap themselves up around ions or small polar molecules, serving simply to facilitate solvation. With the latest-and-greatest advances in technology, plus some really creative thinking by brilliant minds all around the world, it’s now becoming clear that water chemistry is significantly more complex than initially believed.
The chemical structures plants generate – like proteins, for example – have lots of small, charged groups arranged in precise locations, and those charged groups attract water molecules, holding them in specific orientations. The geometry of the bonds is critical, because individual molecules of water can share hydrogen bonds with neighboring molecules, which gives them unique properties.
In the case of catalytic centers, the geometry of the structured water molecules is critical because it affords the transfer of charges between donors and acceptors. Hydration shells and water blankets are thus conduits for charge-transfer reactions.
It might be helpful to think about a custom-tailored, perfectly-wrapped, ultra-thin blanket of water that plants wrap around the surfaces of the molecular structures they weld together. Not only is this water blanket perfectly tailored; but it’s also flexible, so that when reactions happen, the shells and blankets can dynamically restructure themselves.
It’s not just one layer to the shells and blankets either, there can be multiple. As they flutter around in a biochemical breeze of charge transfer reactions, they can also draw substrates into active sites, and shuffle products of reactions out in a controlled manner.
Plants are masters of weaving structured water layers through geometric orientation via attraction to charged groups on molecules. Hydration shells and water blankets which participate directly in charge-transfer reactions form layers so thin they are nearly impossible to detect, and so precise in their architecture that they seem hard-wired into quantum processes.
Inward flow of substrates into catalytic centers, outward flux of products from those catalytic centers, and the transfer of charges involved, are all phenomena which can be orchestrated by structured water in the form of hydration shells and ultra-thin water blankets.
The careful guidance of energy through all of these events prevents random dispersion and accidental diffusion. This is important because charge-transfer events, particularly single-electron transfer events, cannot afford much promiscuity. If the charge is transferred to the wrong acceptor, it could initiate an irreversible chain reaction that leads to cellular death – singlet oxygen free radicals are perfect examples of such reactive species formed through the imprecise transfer of electrons.
Safeguarding against the risk of death through this kind of “charge slippage” is something plants have had several hundreds of millions of years to figure out, and it turns out hydration shells and water blankets are perfectly suited to handle both charge-transfer and protect against charge-slippage. Distilled water is an excellent insulator, while mineral-rich water is an excellent conductor – and plants have become masters of using something in-between.
In plants, structured water is usually not distilled nor particularly mineral-rich; rather, it’s carefully woven around charged groups on molecules, and so it doesn’t neatly fit into a simple analogy of insulator-vs-conductor. The point is that water molecules can be structured to selectively facilitate electron and proton transfer precisely.
Proton Vectorization Through Shells and Blankets
The way protons transfer through shells and blankets of structured water chains is worth looking at in greater detail – this is one of the entry points into the quantum space of photobiology, bridging the gap between matter behaving like particles and matter behaving like waves.
But first, let’s make sure we have the basics down: the standard elements most people are familiar with move through water in a very straightforward and predictable way. If we have a pool of water, and introduce some nutritional elements that plants need on one end – such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and so on – we can watch those elements physically migrate to the other side.
Protons do not move like this. Instead of moving around and physically migrating in their surrounding environment, protons are absorbed into a delocalized hydrogen-bond network, hopping around via something called the Grotthuss mechanism.
If a proton enters one side of a shell or blanket of structured water molecules, a different proton may be expelled from somewhere else in the chain, and the expulsion happens at a much faster rate than classical diffusion allows for.
This behavior is something plants cleverly utilize to create vectorized proton flow, and to eliminate random hydrogen bonding events. If protons moved like other ions, and plants did not have mechanisms to prevent diffusion, then the effect would be a dissipation of proton energy. It’s no surprise that we see plants focusing and concentrating the protons.
Conventional wisdom on charge separation attributes proton gradient formation to the enzymatic machineries embedded within the membranes – but ironically enough, each one of those protein complexes require structured hydration shells and blankets to function; and without them, the charge transfer reactions which they catalyze stop functioning.
Do As Nature Is
In the context of photobiology, the fact that charge transfer reactions cease in the absence of water should be a clear indication that water is directly involved in charge transfer reactions.
Plants have spent millions of years refining their abilities to leverage this abiotic, hydrodynamic charge-separation to the deepest extent possible – they literally split water molecules apart into electrons, protons, and highly reactive oxygen species that are precisely quenched via coupled recombination. Clearly, plants have mastered water chemistry.
It may seem subtle but it’s worth stressing that plants do not force reactions to occur when those reactions can occur passively. Hydration shells and water blankets are capable of “doing the work” without energy expenditure by plants – their energy instead flows into assembling organic molecules which have charged groups that behave as anchor points.
While it may seem like pseudoscience to say that “doing the work” can be done without energy expenditure by plants, we’ve already established the basis for abiotic charge-separation occurring strictly between sunlight and water molecules… but perhaps it’s more fitting to leave it there, in that context.
Layering in photobiology adds a unique twist, and it would be more accurate to say that structured water shells and blankets enable plants to leverage thermodynamic gradients in such a way that results in bare-minimum energy expenditure.
The precise geometric orientation of molecules as a means to achieving thermodynamically-favorable reactions is something that already exists in plant biology, and the perfect example exists in thylakoidal carbonic anhydrase, which is widely considered to be one of the most efficient (and impressive, in our opinion) enzymes in nature.
In general, carbonic anhydrases are enzymes which catalyze the following reaction:
CO₂ + H₂O ↔ H₂CO₃ ↔ HCO₃⁻ + H⁺
What we’re looking at here is a reversible (arrows leading both ways) hydration of CO₂ with H₂O, producing carbonic acid which rapidly ionizes into bicarbonate and a proton. This reaction happens in nature, and does not require any assistance from plants – which is something plants recognized, learned to work with, and over the course of time, leveraged it to the maximum extent allowed by the laws of physics.
Rather than spending energy on forcing this reaction to happen, thylakoidal carbonic anhydrase works by lowering the amount of energy required to facilitate the reaction. The decrease in activation energy is achieved through geometric orientation of substrates flowing in, and products emanating out, from the catalytic center – in the case of the forward-direction of the reaction, it means CO₂ and H₂O molecules are arranged in precise ways that allow for the reaction to occur with no energy input required to catalyze it.
While thylakoidal carbonic anhydrase is our favorite enzyme, and serves as a point of inspiration for us, it should also be mentioned that plants are subject to the laws of thermodynamics and therefore favor enzymatic processes which allow for maximum accumulation of energy and minimal expenditure of that energy.
As such, rather than dumping energy into overcoming energetic barriers that limit reaction kinetics, plants have evolved tools which allow them to lower those barriers by doing things like optimizing the geometry of the substrates so the reactions require the bare-minimum amount of energy going in to catalyze.
Nature drives the reactions, not plants. Plant biochemistry is about optimizing the way the components come together – light, carbon, and water. It might be a fitting description to say that plants will always take the path of least resistance.
Delocalized Electrons: Resonant and Aromatic Structures
Maybe it’s debatable to say they always take the path of least resistance, but it’s technically true when we talk about electron transport chains. One of the ways that we can better understand how plants take the path of least resistance with electron transport chains is by looking at two very specific kinds of structures that plants make: resonant and aromatic.
Individual atoms have electron orbitals, and when multiple atoms which make up one molecule are positioned correctly with each other, they end up having overlaps in a very specific kind of their electron orbitals. This shared pool of electrons does not belong to any one atom individually, but rather is shared by multiple, and so an interesting phenomena begins to arise: electrons can be passed back and forth through shared pools without destabilizing the larger molecule.
The carbonyl mechanism is a great example – it’s more often referred to as a functional group or moiety, but the term “mechanism” seems more fitting because it represents something deeply fundamental in nature: the relationship between carbon, oxygen, and electron transfer.
This relationship, although seemingly simple, captures everything about plant biology. Delocalized electron clouds shared by carbon and oxygen are the heartbeat of chemical reactions – the oxygen and carbon both pull on electrons, but oxygen’s pull is stronger, and so the electrons get pulled away from the carbon, which opens carbon up for chemical reactions while still being stabilized by the bonds it shares with oxygen.
As the carbon reacts, electrons transferred to it ultimately get pulled away by the oxygen, creating a directional flow and allowing for repetitive reactions without the molecule falling apart. This charge-transfer mechanism underpins all of plant biology – sugars, organic and amino acids, all primary metabolic pathways and all secondary metabolic pathways too.
Without this specific interaction between carbon and oxygen, there is no basis for life.
Another fantastic example is benzene – a six-carbon molecule where each carbon is bonded to one hydrogen, and the molecule is arranged in a hexagonal shape. Each carbon atom has electron clouds that are perpendicular to the hydrogen bonds, so they end up sitting “above” and “below” each carbon like halos. The electron clouds overlap with each other, forming a continuous ring of delocalized electrons.
In this case, the continuous ring of delocalized electron orbitals makes this particular resonant structure “aromatic” which – like the carbonyl mechanism – forms another one of the pillars of plant biology. Without resonance and aromaticity, the way plants perform charge-separation reactions would be limited to much simpler transfers, and this planet would certainly be unrecognizable.
Photosynthesis Arises from Collapsing Wavefunctions
Although our view of plants as quantum-scale particle decelerators has been largely metaphorical, it’s not a metaphor anymore when we talk about how photosynthesis arises from the collapse of a wavefunction – this is actually how it happens.
There’s a couple of ways in which chlorophyll pigments can capture photons and initiate electron transport chains in chloroplasts. There are light-harvesting complexes, and there are reaction centers – both contain chlorophyll pigments which are fine-tuned to capture the same frequencies of light, but the way they pass energy around is different.
In reaction centers, chlorophyll pigments are so close to each other that the magnesium ions in their porphyrin rings will have an overlap in their electron orbitals, and this overlapping electron orbital is where the quantum magic happens. Photons from the sun can interact directly with the delocalized electron orbitals shared by chlorophyll pigments in reaction centers. The interaction between a photon and an electron causes the electron to become excited and jump up to a higher orbital – the classical description of how light-energy is transferred into plants, but with a quantum twist.
There’s a brief moment of time – roughly 0.00000000000001 or fewer seconds – where the electron exists in a state of being an “electron-hole pair” in the shared electron cloud. This pair is known as an “exciton” and represents both the newly-excited electron in its higher orbital, and the charge-void left behind as a direct result of that electron becoming excited into a higher orbital.
Because the exciton is in the shared pool, its wavefunction is shared between multiple chlorophyll pigments. Thus, a strange quantum effect is achieved: the exciton explores multiple electron transport chains simultaneously through a single wavefunction, before finally collapsing into one defined transport chain.
In the light-harvesting complex, whose cross-section is much larger and closer to the exterior of the chloroplasts than reaction centers, chlorophyll pigments are not only more likely to absorb photon energy first, but they are also spaced at least twice as far away from each other, resulting in individual pigments not having overlapping orbitals.
The lack of direct overlap results in a different mechanism by which energy is transferred. For starters, true charge-separation does not occur in light-harvesting complexes because the electrons which become excited remain in the same chlorophyll molecule. They become excited, then return to their ground states, whereas in the reaction centers the electron itself is transferred out altogether.
If the electrons stay in the same molecule, how does the energy get transferred?
Resonance. What a photon is represents an energy delta: the difference between an electron in its ground state, and an electron in its next-higher orbital. That distinct quanta of energy can be transferred through resonance rather than transferring the excited electron. As such, the entire light-harvesting complex essentially functions like a tuning fork, with each individual chlorophyll molecular oscillating in resonance with the others, and concentrating excitation energy to the reaction centers, where the real quantum magic happens.
The reaction centers intrigue us greatly: quantum coherence is the paradigm, and actual charge-separation happens because the electron itself is transferred. This is profound, as it can create a feed-forward mechanism for capturing photon energy, with the light harvesting complex serving as a resonant buffer pool.
In other words, electrons are not pushed into transport chains by photons, they are pulled into transport chains through quantum coherence in reaction centers, through resonance transfer networks embedded in the light-harvesting complexes. In our view, the light-harvesting complexes exist as an optimization strategy that results in thermodynamic and electrochemical gradients being established which stabilize the collapse of wavefunctions into defined pathways.
To better understand this, it might help to draw some metaphors to how lightning strikes.
Lightning strikes are charge-transfer events: a high concentration of negative charges builds up in the clouds to a critical threshold, at which point the energy is discharged towards regions of opposite charge or lower electrical potential. Intense electrical attraction between donors and acceptors results in a short-lived bridge being formed between them, where incredible levels of energy can be discharged rapidly.
Of course, this bridge is a bolt of lightning, and the branched architecture of the bolt is the physical pathway the charge is transferred through. A significant charge difference between two points (donor and acceptor/source and sink) is one of the necessary conditions for discharge to occur. Lightning strikes, therefore, are not random events, but rather represent a flow of energy along the most energetically-favorable pathways, which offer the least resistance and greatest discharge potential.
It might be helpful to think about a lightning bolt arising from the collapse of a wavefunction, it will help us tie the analogy back to photosynthesis arising from collapsed wavefunctions.
Before the lightning bolt is shaped, its energy exists purely as electrical potential with an undetermined pathway. This potential can persist in an undetermined state for a long time, simultaneously exploring a seemingly-infinite number of branched pathways; but only when specific source-sink conditions are met, does one singular pathway collapse into existence and create a singular bolt of lightning.
It’s exactly the same with plants: there is a molecular “ground” which pulls excited electrons inward through a singular transport chain, much like the surface of the Earth can serve as the literal ground that allows for electrical potential to be discharged through a singular bolt of lightning.
In both cases, energy exists in a high-potential, excited state. The final sink for that energy is not random, but rather precisely determined by a system of environmental constraints and thermodynamic gradients. In quantum systems, like our microscopic reaction centers, this manifests as a collapse into coherence with the environment, resulting in action that appears sudden, yet is profoundly shaped by invisible structure. In macroscopic systems, like our thunderstorms, this manifests as a colossal bolt of lightning.
Redox Networks as Charge Distribution Conduits
On Earth, charge builds up in the atmosphere, the air beneath it serves as a conduit, and the ground below that is a sink for electrical potential. In plants, the equivalent metaphor is that charge builds up in Photosystem 2 (PSII), the electron transport chain serves as a conduit, and Photosystem 1 (PSI) is the sink or the molecular ground.
Both PSII and PSI have reaction centers, and both reaction centers are fed by light-harvesting complexes that funnel excitation energy in towards them. In these reaction centers, true charge-separation occurs because an electron is transferred out, which means another electron must be brought in to replace it.
PSII harvests electrons from water molecules, which supplies the entire chain and feeds PSI. The mechanism by which plants do this is one of the most fascinating feats in all biology, and we will dedicate an entire blog post to just discussing how plants depressurize water molecules to release their constituent electrons, protons, and oxygen. For now, we just need to understand that water molecules supply electrons which feed transport chains, and eventually form redox networks.
In plants, redox networks are formed by electron-storing pairs of molecules, which are reduced and oxidized forms of each other. Each pair forms a layer, each layer contributes to the larger redox network, and the larger redox network functions exactly like a computational logic circuit.
Essentially, redox networks are dynamic gates which distribute variable, and precise, charge loads across different cellular compartments. As such, it makes sense to build out our understanding of each layer based on their proximity to the initial electron transport events, which happen in chloroplasts and mitochondria.
In our first layer, the two redox pairs are NADPH and NADP+ (in chloroplasts), along with NADH and NAD+ in mitochondria. The next layer contains the glutathione pairs GSH and GSSG, and the final layer is the ascorbate pairs Vitamin C and DHA.
The primary layers receive the flux of electrons directly from electron transport chains in both chloroplasts and mitochondria, and so their shifts between reduced and oxidized states happen to a greater extent than the other systems. Between the two; the pairs in chloroplasts are subject to greater redox flux, largely due to the colossal power of the sun, and partially because oxygen is actually the preferred electron acceptor in mitochondria.
In the second system – the glutathione pairs GSH and GSSG – the balancing of redox potential extends out from the primary sites of electron transport, and begins establishing equilibria with various cellular compartments which do not directly participate in electron capture, but require electrons to function. The third layer – the ascorbate pairs Vitamin C and DHA – contribute to the maintenance of whole-cell redox levels between all compartments.
The unique feature of oxygen serving as the electron sink in mitochondria forms the basis for reactive oxygen signaling in plants, which becomes a component of the larger redox network, and it also invites a conversation about whether oxygen’s ability to store electrons translates to the ability to encode information in structured water, in exactly the same way that silicon microchips can store information in computer RAM or a hard drive.
Mitochondria are also special in that; aside from their utilization of oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor, they can uncouple their oxidative processes from ATP synthesis, which allows them to generate heat.
This uncoupled respiration allows plants to maintain equilibriums between energy production and energy consumption, and also creates a mechanism by which plants can structure water in the absence of direct sunlight: the energy generated from uncoupled mitochondrial respiration releases the captured energy of the sun, and can thus directly result in the formation of structured water.
In chloroplasts, the formation of structured water, and thus hydration conduits for proton vectorization, is provided by the very same energy source powering the electron transport chains – the sun.
Our three redox systems are buffered in a stepwise manner – moving out from the first layer, the second and third layers are progressively more reduced, and serve as sinks for reduction power that can be accessed when the preceding systems deal with increasingly higher levels of oxidative stress being generated in various compartments of the cell.
It’s a wheel within a wheel within a wheel of charge separation, transfer, and storage.
Third-Generation Understandings
Where does all this leave us? Well, the truth is that the end of this post is just the beginning of our explorations. It’s not about where we leave things off, it’s about where we set off to. We are excited for the future, and as we venture forward, we will always remember one simple thing, and it’s the same thing that led us to be so successful with the first two generations of our products.
It all comes back to thermodynamics. There is a constant flux of energy that this entire planet is receiving from the sun – and such an enormous amount, that it really begs the question: why would plants spend energy on things that not only can be, but actually are, powered by the sun?
For some, the cross-section between quantum physics and plant biochemistry remains theoretical and nebulous; but for us, it defines our future as the most advanced fertilizer manufacturer in the world. The greatest lesson to appreciate as we enter the third generation of our carbon-based fertilizer technology is that plants have evolved sophisticated ways to leverage naturally-occurring phenomena at the quantum scale in order to produce biomass at the macro scale, and we’ve learned how to tap into that.
Over the coming months and years, we will continue exploring this cross-section further and further. Just like we did with the first two generations of our carbon-based fertilizers, we do so in a way that allows every grower to experience the benefits and see for themselves what next-generation fertilizers are truly capable of achieving. Our products are only becoming easier to use and providing even greater benefits for all plants grown anywhere in the world.
Welcome to Gen 3.