In: Biology
A common kitchen trick to ripening fruit is to place unripe fruit near a piece of ripe fruit on the counter. This greatly increases the rate of ripening for the unripe fruit. How does this observation provide evidence that ethylene is a gas?
Ethylene act as a fruit ripener because it breaks complex sugars into simple sugars like starch to glucose and fructose making the fruit sweet. It is a very clear observation when one unripe fruit is placed near the ripe fruit, the unripe fruit also gets ripe. It is because the ethylene gas from the ripe fruit reaches to the unripe fruit by diffusion and makes it ripe too.
If the ethylene might not be a gas then it might have not entered easily into the other unripe fruit through diffusion. Contact of these two fruits make the diffusion much easier and ethylene enters the other fruit crossing its cell wall and cell membrane.