The Evolution and Advantages of The C4 Pathway
Further information: Evolutionary history of plants#Evolution of photosynthetic pathwaysC4 plants have a competitive advantage over plants possessing the more common C3 carbon fixation pathway under conditions of drought, high temperatures, and nitrogen or CO2 limitation. When grown in the same environment, at 30°C, C3 grasses lose approximately 833 molecules of water per CO2 molecule that is fixed, whereas C4 grasses lose only 277 water molecules per CO2 molecule fixed. This increased water use efficiency of C4 grasses means that soil moisture is conserved, allowing them to grow for longer in arid environments.
C4 carbon fixation has evolved on up to 40 independent occasions in different families of plants, making it a prime example of convergent evolution. C4 plants arose around 25 to 32 million years ago during the Oligocene (precisely when is difficult to determine) and did not become ecologically significant until around 6 to 7 million years ago, in the Miocene Period. C4 metabolism originated when grasses migrated from the shady forest undercanopy to more open environments, where the high sunlight gave it an advantage over the C3 pathway. Drought was not necessary for its innovation; rather, the increased resistance to water stress was a by-product of the pathway and allowed C4 plants to more readily colonise arid environments.
Today, C4 plants represent about 5% of Earth's plant biomass and 3% of its known plant species. Despite this scarcity, they account for about 30% of terrestrial carbon fixation. Increasing the proportion of C4 plants on earth could assist biosequestration of CO2 and represent an important climate change avoidance strategy. Present-day C4 plants are concentrated in the tropics and subtropics (below latitudes of 45°) where the high air temperature contributes to higher possible levels of oxygenase activity by RuBisCO, which increases rates of photorespiration in C3 plants.
Read more about this topic: C4 Carbon Fixation
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