The major product of photosynthesis in most plants, including Solanum lycopersicum, is sucrose. Sucrose is essential for plant development, growth, storage of carbon, stress protection, signal transduction, among other functions. In plants that undergo photosynthesis, D-glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate is transported into the cytoplasm from the chloropast. It is then modified by enzymes involved in gluconeogenesis and transformed to beta-D-fructofuranose 6-phosphate which is then used to produce sucrose. This is done by synthesizing the phosphorylated entity of sucrose, known as sucrose 6F-phosphate, and then dephosphorylating the chemical via the enzyme sucrose-phosphate phosphatase into sucrose. Interestingly, sucrose is synthesized in plants and cyanobacteria, but not in other organisms. Many plants also contain the enzyme sucrose synthase, whose title is misleading because under physiological conditions this enzyme usually catalyzes a sucrose degradation reaction, but under rare circumstances can also generate sucrose as a product.

Sucrose Biosynthesis References