What does a plant do with the glucose it makes?

What does the plant do with the glucose it makes?

Have kids note that a plant has no internal bones or skeleton, but recall that each plant cell is surrounded with a more or less rigid cell wall. The structure of the whole plant with all its parts is solely dependent on the cell walls of individual cells: their size, shape, and the manner in which they are stuck together, or remain separate. Kids may visualize this as similar to building an elaborate structure from Lago Blocks.

The major constituent of cell walls is a chemical called cellulose. Cellulose is basically a long chains of glucose molecules linked tougher in a peculiar manner that makes them undigestible by humans (and most other vertebrate animals) We just don’t have the proper enzyme for breading that linkage. Therefore, they just go through and out the other end (as roughage). The following website gives you a picture of cellulose molecules woven together to make a cell wall. 

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Structure-of-cellulose-fibrils_fig2_354705587

Have kids consider:

The size and shape of a plant, down it its finest details, is solely the disposition of its cells and how they function. How the plant’s DNA “supervises and controls” this “disposition” is still a mystery. Perhaps you can help solve it.

Back to: Uses of the glucose made in photosynthesis:

1. Making cellulose for the construction of cell walls. Recall that all growth is dependent on cell division, cell growth, and cell differentiation, hence the synthesis of cell walls.
2. Making all other molecules involved in the plant’s growth and reproduction. Cell growth, division, and differentiation require, DNA, proteins, lipids, carbohydrate and numerous other molecules for cell metabolism. The plant is able to construct all of these molecules from glucose and certain mineral elements (N, P, K, Ca and others) which it withdraws from the soil via roots. It only involves more complex chemistry.
3. Respiration. The plant, like all living organisms, requires energy for maintaining its life processes. It obtains this energy in the same way as do animals, i.e., respiration (breaking down glucose in the presence of oxygen releasing carbon dioxide and the potential energy bound up in the glucose molecule. 
4. Storage. A major pathway for glucose produced in photosynthesis is into storage for later use. Have kids consider times a plant needs energy but light for photosynthesis is absent — overnight; resuming spring growth when there are no leaves; seeds germinating under soil. During such times, the plant uses (via respiration) what it has stored. This is to say, a plant puts much of its glucose into storage in the form of starch (glucose molecules linked together in another way that is easily digestible). Have kids note that in eating potatoes, corn, rice, wheat, beans, etc., we are eating what the plant stored for itself.