How does natural sugar get into fruit?

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How does natural sugar get into fruit?

In: Biology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Plants photosynthesize and produce glucose, the most common sugar. This is done by capturing the carbon from the air in CO2, combining it with water and energy from sunlight.

Glucose is sweet, but not that sweet. It is mostly made in leaves and as you know leaves aren’t that sweet. It is usually not concentrated much immediately after it is made unless transformed first.

After glucose is made, many things can happen to it.

It can be immediately burned as fuel for the plants normal growth and metabolism.

It can be modified turned into other important chemicals the plant needs. The most common is cellulose. Cellulose is the structural part of plants, made of long chains of glucose.

It can also be turned into starch. Starch is also chains of glucose but arranged differently so that we can digest them unlike cellulose. This is the important one when it comes to fruit.

An unripe fruit is mostly starch as well as some cellulose (that’s the “fiber” part). Starch is not sweet, and therefore unripe fruit is not sweet. It is also the main component of vegetables and grains like potatoes, corn, and wheat. This is why an unripe banana (or more commonly plantain) is cooked like a potato in some cuisines. However as fruits ripen, enzymes break up these large starch chains into individual glucose molecules. Other enzymes will turn this glucose into a different sugar called fructose (which means fruit sugar). Fructose is a lot sweeter than glucose and mainly contributes to the high sweetness of fruits. Sucrose is also made in some fruits, which is a sugar made of one glucose and one fructose.

Tl;dr: sugar is initially stored in a form that makes it not sweet. As the fruit ripens it is broken down and turned into sweeter sugars.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It doesn’t “get into” fruit, the fruit makes the sugar. They use the energy from the sun to combine water and carbon dioxide into sugars.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There a solution sweet that plants need to live and fruits are tanks and we happened to eat them