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The discovery of chloroplasts should not be confused with the discovery of the operation of chlorophyll. The discovery of chloroplasts as organelles inside plant cells is usually credited to Julius von Sachs (1832-1897), an influential botanist and author of standard botanical textbooks - sometimes called "The Father of Plant Physiology"

His discovery was due in part to the development of more powerful microscopes, which enabled him to see, for the first time into the structure of living plant cells.

"In 1864, Sachs observed grains of starch were being formed in leaves exposed to light. He showed that chlorophyll is not distributed randomly throughout the plant but is located in special bodies (later called chloroplasts) within plant cells. He found that the site where glucose is made is in these bodies and glucose is usually stored as starch."

The evolutionary origins of chloroplasts was a puzzle whose solution was first suggested by Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschcowsky in 1906. Mereschcowsky "coined the term "symbiogenesis" when he observed the symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae (Mereschkowski 1905). The term "endosymbiosis" has a Greek origin (endo, meaning "within"; syn, meaning "with"; and biosis, meaning "living"), and it refers to the phenomenon of an organism living within another organism."

This phenomenon was first established as the origin of mitochondria and became the accepted answer for the origin of chloroplasts only following the work of Lynn Margulis in the 1960s.

*Look up chloroplasts in the BBC Learning Zone on Sachs and in Nature.com - where the material on Mereschcowsky as the man who first explained the origin of the chloroplast (not its existence, as is stated elsewhere and previously in this answer) is described.

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9y ago

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