I am a high school student taking AP Bio, and this part of photosynthesis confuses me. I’d appreciate a sort of detailed explanation
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Photosynthesis and the burning of glucose in the mitochondria rely on the same principle, roughly. It’s that if you separate a proton from water, this proton wants to reunite at some point. You use this driving force to generate high energy molecules such as ATP or reducing agents like NADH in mitochondria. The second driving force is that carbon of glucose oxidizes to carbon dioxide spontaneously. The mitochondria do this in a controlled way by pulling electrons from Carbon-Oxigen bonds one by one, by pulling them onto metals that are kept in a flat cage. These metals are then handing over the electrons to a neighbor, but this handover only happens if a proton is pulled from a nearby water (not in every step, and it’s not that easy as discribed). But while the glucose to carbon dioxide reactions drive that passing on. Sunlight does the opposite way. Sunlight excites these metals, and from it electrons are pulled off to reduce carbon. These electrons are refilled by pulling apart water and form oxygen
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