All living organisms, including plants, receive their energy required for their survival from a chain of

chemical reactions called respiration. The process of respiration requires glucose to start the reactions
which are later converted into energy and hence producing carbon dioxide and water as by-products.

Photosynthesis Respiration
Photosynthesis occurs only in chlorophyll Respiration occurs in all animal and plant cell.
containing cells of plants.
It synthesizes foods. It oxidizes foods.
It stores energy It releases energy
Photosynthesis is an anabolic process Respiration is a catabolic process
It requires cytochrome It also requires cytochrome
Endothermal process Exothermal process
It is comprised of products like sugar, oxygen, It is comprised of products like hydrogen and
and water as products. carbon-dioxide.
During this process, radiant energy is converted During this process potential energy is converted
into potential energy into kinetic energy
It takes place only in the presence of sunlight. It takes place continuously throughout the life
process from birth to death.

Respiration in Roots
Roots also absorb air from the air spaces present between the soil particles. Thus, the oxygen absorbed
through roots are used to release energy which is later utilized for the transport of minerals and salts from
the soil.
We are aware of the fact that plants have the unique ability to photosynthesize. Photosynthesis is the
process by which plants prepare their own food. It takes place only in the parts of plants that contain
chlorophyll, i.e. only in the green parts of the plants. The process of photosynthesis is so prominent that it
sometimes masks the process of respiration in plants. However, we must know that respiration in plants
occurs throughout the day while photosynthesis takes place only in the presence of light. Therefore, at
night the respiration in plants becomes prominent. That is why we often hear that people are asked not to
sleep under a tree at night. This may cause suffocation due to the excessive presence of carbon dioxide
released by trees as a result of respiration.

Respiration In Stem
In the case of the stem, the air gets diffused in the stomata and passes through various parts of the cell for
Respiration. The carbon dioxide produced during this stage also diffuses through the stomata. In higher
plants or woody plants, the gaseous exchange is carried out by lenticels.
Respiration In Leaves
Leaves comprise of tiny pores referred as stomata. The exchange of gases takes place via stomata through
the process of diffusion. Each stoma is controlled by Guard Cells. The opening and closing of the stoma help
in the exchange of gases between Atmosphere and Interior of Leaves.
Types of Respiration

1. Aerobic Respiration is a process which occurs within the mitochondria of

all eukaryotic organisms. In this process, food substances are completely oxidized into the
water, carbon-dioxide and energy are released in the presence of oxygen. All higher organisms
respire aerobically and this process requires atmospheric oxygen.
2. Anaerobic Respiration is a process which occurs in the cytoplasm of prokaryotic organisms like
bacteria and yeast. In this process, less energy is released due to the incomplete oxidation of
food in the absence of oxygen. Carbon dioxide and Ethyl alcohol are produced during anaerobic
respiration

Medical Aspects of Plants

Medicinal plants, additionally called medicinal herbs, have been located and used in traditional
medicinal drug practices for the reason that prehistoric times. Plants synthesise hundreds of chemicals
for features such as defence against bugs, fungi, sicknesses, and herbivorous mammals. Numerous
phytochemicals with ability or mounted biological activity had been diagnosed. However, in view that a
unmarried plant consists of extensively diverse phytochemicals, the effects of using an entire plant as
medicinal drug are uncertain. Further, the phytochemical content material and pharmacological actions,
if any, of many vegetation having medicinal potential remain unassessed by rigorous clinical studies to
outline efficacy and protection. In the USA over the length 1999 to 2012, despite numerous hundred
programs for brand new drug repute, simplest two botanical drug candidates had enough evidence of
medicinal price to be permitted through the Food and Drug Administration.

 The earliest historic facts of herbs are found from the Sumerian civilisation, in which loads of medicinal
vegetation which includes opium are indexed on clay drugs. The Ebers Papyrus from historical Egypt
describes over 850 plant medicines, even as Dioscorides documented over one thousand recipes for
medicines using over 600 medicinal flowers in De materia medica, forming the idea of pharmacopoeias
for a few 1500 years.
 Drug studies makes use of ethnobotany to look for pharmacologically lively substances in nature, and
has in this way discovered hundreds of useful compounds. These encompass the commonplace capsules
aspirin, digoxin, quinine, and opium. The compounds found in flora are of many types, but most are in
four essential biochemical classes: alkaloids, glycosides, polyphenols, and terpenes.
Prehistoric Time

 Plants, along with many now used as culinary herbs and spices, were used as drugs, no longer always
correctly, from prehistoric instances. Spices were used partly to counter food spoilage micro organism,
particularly in warm climates,and mainly in meat dishes which smash extra easily.

 Angiosperms (flowering vegetation) had been the original supply of maximum plant medicines.Human
settlements are frequently surrounded with the aid of weeds used as herbal drug treatments, inclusive
of nettle, dandelion and chickweed.Humans have been no longer by myself in using herbs as drug
treatments: some animals including nonhuman primates, monarch butterflies and sheep ingest
medicinal flowers whilst they're unwell.Plant samples from prehistoric burial websites are some of the
strains of proof that Paleolithic peoples had expertise of herbal medicine.

 For example, a 60000-year-vintage Neanderthal burial web site, "Shanidar IV", in northern Iraq has
yielded massive amounts of pollen from 8 plant species, 7 of which can be used now as herbal
remedies.A mushroom turned into found inside the personal consequences of Otzi the Iceman, whose
body changed into frozen within the Otztal Alps for extra than five,000 years. The mushroom changed
into possibly used against whipworm.

Ancient Times

 In historic Sumeria, masses of medicinal vegetation such as myrrh and opium are indexed on clay
tablets. The ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus lists over 800 plant drug treatments including aloe, hashish,
castor bean, garlic, juniper, and mandrake.

 From historic instances to the existing, Ayurvedic medicinal drug as documented inside the Atharva
Veda, the Rig Veda and the Sushruta Samhita has used hundreds of pharmacologically active herbs and
spices which include turmeric, which incorporates curcumin. The Chinese pharmacopoeia, the Shennong
Ben Cao Jing information plant medicines which include chaulmoogra for leprosy, ephedra, and hemp.

 This became improved in the Tang Dynasty Yaoxing Lun. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle's pupil
Theophrastus wrote the primary systematic botany textual content, Historia plantarum. In the primary
century AD, the Greek health practitioner Pedanius Dioscorides documented over 1000 recipes for drug
treatments the usage of over six hundred medicinal flowers in De materia medica; it remained the
authoritative reference on herbalism for over 1500 years, into the 17th century.

Middle Ages

 In the Early Middle Ages, Benedictine monasteries preserved scientific information in Europe,
translating and copying classical texts and keeping herb gardens
.  Hildegard of Bingen wrote Causae et Curae ("Causes and Cures") on medicinal drug. In the Islamic
Golden Age, scholars translated many classical Greek texts including Dioscorides into Arabic, including
their very own commentaries.
 Herbalism flourished within the Islamic world, specially in Baghdad and in Al-Andalus. Among many
works on medicinal plants, Abulcasis (936–1013) of Cordoba wrote The Book of Simples, and Ibn al-
Baitar (1197–1248) recorded loads of medicinal herbs which includes Aconitum, nux vomica, and
tamarind in his Corpus of Simples.

 Avicenna covered many plants in his 1025 The Canon of Medicine. Abu-Rayhan Biruni, Ibn Zuhr, Peter
of Spain, and John of St Amand wrote in addition pharmacopoeias.

Early Modern

 The Early Modern duration noticed the flourishing of illustrated herbals across Europe, starting with
the 1526 Grete Herball.

 John Gerard wrote his well-known The Herball or General History of Plants in 1597, based on Rembert
Dodoens, and Nicholas Culpeper posted his The English Physician
Enlarged.

Many new plant medicines arrived in Europe as merchandise of Early Modern exploration and the
ensuing Columbian Exchange, in which farm animals, crops and technologies were transferred among
the Old World and the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.

 Medicinal herbs arriving in the Americas protected garlic, ginger, and turmeric; espresso, tobacco and
coca travelled inside the other direction. In Mexico, the 16th century Badianus Manuscript described
medicinal vegetation to be had in Central America.

Phytochemical Basis

 All plants produce chemical compounds which give them an evolutionary advantage, such as
defending against herbivores or, in the example of salicylic acid, as a hormone in plant defenses.

 These phytochemicals have potential for use as drugs, and the content and known pharmacological
activity of these substances in medicinal plants is the scientific basis for their use in modern medicine, if
scientifically confirmed.

 For instance, daffodils (Narcissus) contain nine groups of alkaloids including galantamine, licensed for
use against Alzheimer's disease. The alkaloids are bitter-tasting and toxic, and concentrated in the parts
of the plant such as the stem most likely to be eaten by herbivores; they may also protect against
parasites.

 Modern knowledge of medicinal plants is being systematised in the Medicinal Plant Transcriptomics
Database, which by 2011 provided a sequence reference for the transcriptome of some thirty species.
The major classes of pharmacologically active phytochemicals are described below, with examples of
medicinal plants that contain them.

Alkaloids

Alkaloids are sour-tasting chemical substances, very full-size in nature, and frequently toxic, determined
in many medicinal plants. There are several classes with exceptional modes of motion as drugs, each
recreational and pharmaceutical.

Medicines of different lessons include,

 Atropine  Scopolamine  hyoscyamine (all from nightshade)

The conventional medicinal drug berberine,

 caffeine (Coffea)
 cocaine (Coca)
 ephedrine (Ephedra)
 morphine (opium poppy)
 nicotine (tobacco)
 reserpine (Rauwolfia serpentina)
 quinidine and quinine(Cinchona)
 vincamine (Vinca minor)
 vincristine (Catharanthus roseus).

Glycosides
Anthraquinone glycosides are determined in medicinal flora which includes,
 Rhubarb
 Cascara
 Alexandrian senna.

Plant-primarily based laxatives crafted from such flowers consist of,

 Senna
 rhubarb
 Aloe.

The cardiac glycosides are powerful pills from medicinal plants together with foxglove and lily of the
valley. They encompass digoxin and digitoxin which help the beating of the coronary heart, and act as
diuretics.

Polyphenols

 Polyphenols of several classes are good sized in plant life, having various roles in defenses against
plant diseases and predators. They include hormone-mimicking phytoestrogens and astringent tannins.
Plants containing phytoestrogens have been administered for centuries for gynecological problems,
consisting of fertility, menstrual, and menopausal issues. Among those flora are Pueraria mirifica, kudzu,
angelica, fennel, and anise.
 Many polyphenolic extracts, inclusive of from grape seeds, olives or maritime pine bark, are offered as
dietary dietary supplements and cosmetics with out evidence or prison health claims for useful health
effects.
 In Ayurveda, the astringent rind of the pomegranate, containing polyphenols referred to as
punicalagins, is used as a medicinal drug.

Terpenes

 Terpenes and terpenoids of many types are discovered in a selection of medicinal vegetation, and in
resinous vegetation consisting of the conifers. They are strongly aromatic and serve to repel herbivores.
Their scent makes them beneficial in crucial oils, whether or not for perfumes together with rose and
lavender, or for aromatherapy.

 Some have medicinal uses: as an example, thymol is an antiseptic and was once used as a vermifuge
(anti-bug remedy).

Drug Discovery

 The pharmaceutical industry has roots within the apothecary stores of Europe within the 1800s,
wherein pharmacists provided local traditional drugs to customers, which included extracts like
morphine, quinine, and strychnine.
 Therapeutically crucial pills like camptothecin (from Camptotheca acuminata, used in conventional
Chinese medicinal drug) and taxol (from the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia) have been derived from
medicinal plant life.
 The Vinca alkaloids vincristine and vinblastine, used as anti-most cancers drugs, were discovered in the
Fifties from the Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus roseus

. Hundreds of compounds had been identified using ethnobotany, investigating flowers utilized by
indigenous peoples for possible medical programs.

Some crucial phytochemicals, which include,

 Curcumin
 epigallocatechin gallate
 genistein

resveratrol are pan-assay interference compounds, that means that in vitro research of their hobby
often provide unreliable data. As a result, phytochemicals have often established incorrect as lead
compounds in drug discovery

The pharmaceutical enterprise has remained interested in mining traditional makes use of of medicinal
plants in its drug discovery efforts. Of the 1073 small-molecule capsules accredited in the length 1981 to
2010, over 1/2 were either at once derived from or stimulated with the aid of natural substances.
Safety

 Plant drug treatments can cause detrimental outcomes and even death, whether or not through
aspect-outcomes of their lively substances, via adulteration or infection, through overdose, or through
inappropriate prescription.

 Many such results are acknowledged, whilst others remain to be explored scientifically. There is no
cause to presume that because a product comes from nature it must be secure: the life of powerful
herbal poisons like atropine and nicotine shows this to be untrue.

 Further, the excessive standards carried out to conventional medicines do now not usually follow to
plant medicines, and dose can range widely depending at the growth situations of plants: older flowers
can be much greater toxic than younger ones, for instance.

Pharmacologically lively plant extracts can have interaction with conventional tablets, both due to the
fact they will provide an accelerated dose of similar compounds, and due to the fact a few
phytochemicals interfere with the body's structures that metabolise drugs in the liver including the
cytochrome P450 machine, making the drugs ultimate longer in the body and have a greater effective
cumulative effect. Plant medicines may be risky in the course of being pregnant. Since flora may
additionally incorporate many distinct substances, plant extracts may additionally have complicated
outcomes at the human frame.

Plant Cell :
Plant cells are eukaryotic cells that differ in several key aspects from the cells of other eukaryotic
organisms. These distinctive features include the following,
The Cell Wall: It is a rigid layer which is composed of cellulose, glycoproteins, lignin, pectin, and
hemicellulose. It is located outside the cell membrane. It comprises of Protein, polysaccharides, and
cellulose. The primary function of the cell wall is to protect and provide structural support to the cell.
Plant cell wall is also involved in protecting the cell against mechanical stress and other infections.
The formation of the cell wall is guided by microtubules. It consists of three layers the primary, secondary
and the middle lamella. The primary cell wall is formed by cellulose laid down by enzymes.

Cell membrane: It is the semi-permeable membrane present within the cell wall, composed of a thin
layer of protein and fat. The cell membrane plays an important role in regulating the entry and exit of
specific substances within the cell.
Nucleus: It is a membrane-bound structure. The vital function of a nucleus is to store DNA or hereditary
material which include cell division, metabolism, and growth.
  Nucleolus: It manufactures cell’s protein-producing structures and ribosomes.
 Nucleopore: Nuclear membrane is perforated with holes called as nucleopore that allows
proteins and nucleic acids.
Plastids: They are membrane-bound organelles that comprise of own DNA. They are necessary to store
starch, to carry out the process of photosynthesis and in the synthesis of many molecules that are
required for cellular building blocks. Some of the vital types of plastids and their functions are stated
below:
Leucoplasts: They are found in non-photosynthetic tissues of plants. They are used for the storage of
protein, lipid, and starch.
Animal Cell :
The cell is the fundamental unit of life. All living organisms on planet earth are composed unicellular (single
cell) (or) multicellular (many cells). Cells range in its size from a millimeter to microns and generally varies
in their shapes.Few cells are flat, oval, rod, curved, spherical, concave, rectangular, and various other
shapes are also found. Most of the cells are microscopic in size and can only be seen under the microscope.
Some cells are fairly long and large. For example, a neuron in the human body is approximately 100 microns
or 1 meter long and the ostrich egg is the largest cell which ranges from 14-15 cm long and 12-13 cm wide.
Animal cells are a typical eukaryotic cell with a membrane-bound nucleus with the presence of DNA inside
the nucleus. They also comprise of other organelles and cellular structures which carry out specific
functions necessary for the cell to function properly.
The Animal cell is smaller than the plant cell which varies in their sizes and is irregular in shape. It
comprises of the following parts:
Cell Membrane: A thin semipermeable membrane layer of protein and fats surrounding the cell. It helps in
owning the cell together and permits entry and exits of nutrients into the cell.
Nuclear Membrane: It is the double membrane that surrounds the nucleus.
Nucleus: A celestial body containing several organelles including the nucleolus. It contains DNA and other
cell’s hereditary information.
Centrosome: It is a small organelle found near to the nucleus which has a thick center and radiating
tubules. The centrosomes are where microtubules are produced.
Lysosome (Cell Vesicles): They are round organelle surrounded by a membrane comprising of digestive
enzymes which help in digestion, excretion and in cell renewal process.
Cytoplasm: A jelly-like double membrane organelles found outside the cell nucleus in which the
organelles are located.
Golgi Body: A flat smooth layered, sac-like organelle which is located near the nucleus and involved in
manufacturing, storing, packing and transporting the particles throughout the cell.
Mitochondrion: They are spherical to rod-shaped organelles with a double membrane. They are the
powerhouse of a cell as they play an important role in releasing energy.
Ribosome: They are small organelles made up of RNA-rich cytoplasmic granules and they are the sites of
protein synthesis.
Vacuole: A membrane-bound organelles present inside a cell involved in maintaining shape and storing
water, food, wastes, etc.
Nucleopore: They are tiny holes present in the nuclear membrane which are involved in the movement of
nucleic acids and proteins within the cell.

Plant cell Animal cell

Cell Wall Cell wall made of cellulose is Cell wall is absent.
present in almost all cells.
Plastids Plastids like leucoplasts, No plastids found
chloroplast and chromoplasts
are present.
Chloroplasts Plants cells have chloroplasts to Chloroplasts completely absent.
prepare their own food.
Vacuoles.. Cell sap containing vacuoles are Vacuoles are usually absent or
present one or more small vacuoles are
seen
Lysosomes Lysosomes not evident. Lysosomes occur in cytoplasm
Nucleus. Due to the presence of the Nucleus is usually located
vacoule at the centre of the cell, centrally
nucleus may be located at the
edge of the cell
Golgi bodies. Plant cells have many simpler .Animal cells have a single
units of golgi complex, called highly elaborate golgi complex.
dictyosomes.
Endoplasmic reticulum Present Present
Ribosomes Present Present
Mitochondria Present Present
Centrioles Present only in lower plant Present
forms
Microtubules/ microfilaments Present Present
Flagella May be found in some cells. May be found in some cells.
. Cilia Very rare Present Very rare Present
Nutrition. Can prepare own food through Cannot make their own food.
photosynthesis. They depend directly or
indirectly on plants for their
food.
Locomotion Most plants do not exhibit Most animals exhibit
movement locomotion
Growth and development Keep growing throughout their Growth stops after maturation,
life and are localized in the but body cells are replaced
apical meristem periodically
Cell shape and structure Rigid, fixes rectangular shape Lack rigidity, are round and
irregular shape
Starch grains Present Are not present