Photosynthesis At 1000 ppm CO in measuring air, both the C3 and C4 plants had similar leaf photosynthetic rates around 60 μmol CO·m·s indicating the suppression of photorespiration in C3 plants. There are three main factors affecting photosynthesis and several corollary factors. The three main are: Total photosynthesis is limited by a range of environmental factors. These include the amount of light available, the amount of leaf area a plant has to capture light (shading by other plants is a major limitation of photosynthesis), rate at which carbon dioxide can be supplied to the chloroplasts to support photosynthesis, the availability of
Artificial photosynthesis particular how much of the incident light can be used in a system in practice. This is comparable with photosynthetic efficiency, where light-to-chemical-energy conversion is measured. Photosynthetic organisms are able to collect about 50% of incident solar radiation, however the theoretical limit of photosynthetic efficiency is 4.6 and 6.0% for C3 and C4 plants respectively. In reality, the efficiency of photosynthesis is much lower and is usually below 1%, with some exceptions such as sugarcane in tropical climate. In contrast, the highest reported efficiency for artificial photosynthesis lab prototypes is 22.4%. However, plants are efficient in using CO at atmospheric