18 Mar 2003 08:41:50 -0800 Todd O wrote:

Um, not quite. Plants respire just fine. It's just that they make
their own oxygen so that they can use respiration in an oxygen
atmosphere to reduce the sugars they've made to use energy.
Photosynthesis is the storage of energy. Respiration is the use or
release of that energy. Animals do the latter. Plants do both.

Respiring plants are a new one on me. Without mitochondria or
oxidative phosphorylation I'm not sure how they'd go about using
oxygen. I've never heard of oxygen being anything but a waste product
to plants. They derive energy from the sun, not from chemical
oxidation.

Steve Turner

Real address contains worldnet instead of spamnet