Question

Will sugar kill plants?

Answer 1

Sugars are known to be the structural components of plants and also serve in providing energy to the plants. They can be further classified into simple sugars such as glucose and complex sugars such as starch.

Complete answer:
Plants are multicellular, photosynthetic eukaryotes that belong to Kingdom Plantae. Plants utilise carbon dioxide and sunlight to produce sugars by a process known as photosynthesis. Green plants consist of a pigment known as chlorophyll which are located in the chloroplast of the plants. This pigment is capable of absorbing light of a particular wavelength and gets excited leading to a chain of events that finally fix carbon leading to formation of sugars and evolution of oxygen. These sugars are utilised as building blocks and make up the structural parts of the plant, they are also utilised for energy. Excess sugars are stored in the plant parts and provide useful during stressful conditions.

The growth of the plant not only depends on carbon dioxide and sunlight but also on other factors such as temperature, available nutrients and water in the soil. External factors such as grazing, lack of nutrients and attack by insects or other plant pathogens can hamper their growth. Sugar thus is useful to plants but excess of sugar can be harmful to plants, it can lead to reverse osmosis leading to loss of water which ultimately lead to the death of the plant.

Thus sugar will not kill plants but excess sugar will definitely harm the plants.

Note: Plants are of great importance because of many reasons, they provide food to humans either directly or indirectly; they provide many valuable medicines along with essential oils, dyes, waxes, tannins, latex; they also serve important roles in biological research.