Ch14: Growth and development

2016-DSE-IB-Q9

Dry the harvested plant in an oven until a constant mass is obtained upon repeated weighing.

Without magnesium, chlorophyll cannot be formed in the leaves so it appears yellow.

Without chlorophyll, the rate of photosynthesis of the plant is lowered. As a result, there is not enough
food produced for the growth of plants. Therefore, both the shoot and root dry mass are smaller than that

of the control setup.

The overall dry mass of the plant under P de cient conditions is much smaller because P is necessary for
the formation of protein which are important for growth.

Without P, more photosynthetic product is transported from leaves to root. As a result, the shoot dry mass
is a lot lower than that of control while the root dry mass maintains more or less the same.