Every culture that has adopted the cultivation of maize—also known as corn—has been radically changed by it. This crop reshaped the cultures of the Native Americans who first cultivated it, leading to such developments as the adoption of agrarian and in some cases urban lifestyles, and much of the explosion of European much more bountiful than others? Modern biochemistry has revealed the physical mechanism underlying maize’s impressive productivity.
To obtain the hydrogen they use in the production of carbohydrates through photosynthesis, all plants split water into its constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. They use the resultant hydrogen to form one of the molecules they need for energy, but the oxygen is released into the atmosphere. During photosynthesis, carbon dioxide that atmospheric conditions, oxygen begins to bind competitively to the enzyme, thus interfering with the photosynthetic reaction.
Some plants, however, have evolved a photosynthetic mechanism that prevents oxygen from impairing photosynthesis. These plants separate the places where they split water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen from the places where they build sugars from carbon dioxide. Water molecules are split, as in all plants, in specialized chlorophyll-containing structures in the Such C-4 plants as sugar cane, rice, and maize are among the world’s most productive crops.
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