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Citrus General Discussion / Re: Lights????
« on: November 28, 2017, 02:30:04 PM »I saw a video comparing side by side plants growing under red + blue LEDs compared to plants growing under all white LEDs. The plants under white LED light looked noticeably better.
There is a whole science on the light use by the plants, not just this video.
It's true red + blue LED is theoretically more efficient at being converted to energy by chlorophyll. But plants have several different chlorophyll pigments and if it's all red + blue light that may be overload on merely one of the pathways plants have for converting light to energy.
Chlorophylls A and B have absorption spectra very close to each other. You probably refer to additional pigments , mostly carotenoid that are able to absorb longer blue radiation and transfer it to chlorophylls. They result in improved use of blue light between 400 and 500 nm.
Although I still think light penetration into the leaf is a more important issue. If almost all the light is being absorbed by the chlorophyll in the surface layer of the leaf, that's an overload, and then the light is not making it down to the deeper cell layers in the leaf. Deep red wavelengths have some penetration but shorter blue wavelengths are very strongly absorbed. Of course leaves have the greatest transparency to green light.
In action spectrum measurements the difference in light penetration is already taken into consideration. Leaves are transparent to green light because they do not contain pigments adsorbing green light, so the green light has almost no effect. Modern white LEDs have three chromophores emitting blue light of 400-500 nm, green light of 500-570nm and red of more than 649 nm. The green portion is almost lost, decreasing the overall efficiency by 30%
They did not run the experiment in that video but I'm very sure plants would grow better under white + red LED than they would under all white.




