CAM plants: photosynthesizing in the desert

Although C₄ plants are well adapted to occasional periods of drought, they cannot cope well with desert conditions. A group of plants including cacti and pineapples have evolved a third type of carbon dioxide fixation which enables them to survive in very dry climates. These plants are called CAM plants. CAM is an abbreviation for crassulacean acid metabolism, a type of metabolism first observed in the family of plants called Crassulaceae (which includes the stonecrops, fleshy-leaved plants that will grow on rocks and walls).

CAM plants conserve water by only opening their stomata at night. During the night, they fix carbon dioxide into oxaloacetate which is converted into malate. This acts as a carbon dioxide storage compound. During the day, malate releases carbon dioxide into the Calvin cycle. This allows photosynthesis to take place on hot, dry, sunny days, even though the stomata are closed.

CAM plants conserve water very well and are able to survive in extremely dry conditions, but CAM plants do not photosynthesise very efficiently. Most are very slow growing. Where there is plenty of water, CAM plants cannot compete well with C₃ and C₄ plants.

CAM plants and C₄ plants have a similar metabolism: carbon dioxide is first fixed into a four-carbon intermediate before it enters the Calvin cycle. However, in CAM plants the initial fixation and the Calvin cycle occur at separate times, whereas in C₄ plants the initial fixation and the Calvin cycle are separated structurally but both occur during the day. C₄ plants live in hot, very sunny, and periodically dry environments but where lack of water is rarely a limiting factor (partly because the plants can reduce water losses due to their C₄ metabolism) and annual rainfall is high (typically, tropical rainforest-type climates); CAM plants are desert plants that live in areas of very low annual rainfall. Note that C₃, C₄, and CAM plants all eventually use the Calvin cycle to make glucose from carbon dioxide.

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