INVOLVED IN PHOTOSYNTHESIS?

Looking at plants have you ever wondered why and how there are so many shades of green in their leaves – even in the same plant? We can look for an answer to this question by trying to separate the leaf pigments of any green plant through paper chromatography. A chromatographic separation of the leaf pigments shows that the colour that we see in leaves is not due to a single pigment but due to four pigments: Chlorophyll aaaaa (bright or blue green in the chromatogram), chlorophyll bbbbb (yellow green), xanthophylls (yellow) and carotenoids (yellow to yellow-orange). Let us now see what roles various pigments play in photosynthesis.

Pigments are substances that have an ability to absorb light, at specific wavelengths. Can you guess which is the most abundant plant pigment in the world? Let us study the graph showing the ability of chlorophyll a pigment to absorb lights of different wavelengths (Figure