linguistic:voice_change, information:filtering, structural:summarization
C3 : C4 photosynthesis research

In the late 1940s at the University of California, Berkeley, the details of photosynthetic carbon metabolism were sorted out by the chemists Melvin Calvin, Andrew Benson, James Bassham and a score of students and researchers utilizing the carbon-14 isotope and paper chromatography techniques. The pathway of CO fixation by the algae Chlorella in a fraction of a second in light resulted in a three carbon molecule called phosphoglyceric acid (PGA). For that original and ground-breaking work, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Melvin Calvin in 1961. In parallel, plant physiologists studied leaf gas exchanges using the new method of infrared gas analysis and a leaf chamber where the net photosynthetic rates ranged from 10 to 13 μmol CO ·m ·s, with the conclusion that all terrestrial plants have the same photosynthetic capacities, that are light saturated at less than 50% of sunlight.