The difference between autotrophs and heterotrophs The fundamental difference between autotrophs and heterotrophs lies in whether simple inorganic substances can be transformed into organic substances.
Types and characteristics of assimilation;
Autotrophic type: refers to the metabolic type in which most green plants and a few kinds of bacteria use light energy or chemical energy as energy source and carbon dioxide in the environment as carbon source to synthesize organic matter and store energy.
Heterotrophic type: inorganic substances cannot be directly synthesized into organic substances, and ready-made organic substances must be ingested to maintain life.
Autotrophic organisms: green plants, photosynthetic bacteria and chemosynthetic bacteria.
Heterotrophs: Animals, people, most bacteria and fungi.
Biological metabolism:
Metabolism is the general name of all orderly chemical reactions in living cells, and it is the most basic life activity process of organisms. According to different standards, it can be divided into two functions: assimilation and alienation, and material and energy metabolism. Assimilation can be divided into autotrophic and heterotrophic, and alienation can be divided into aerobic and anaerobic. Yeast is an alkaline anaerobic organism.
What is an autotroph? As an ecological term, autotrophs are also called independent vegetative organisms, and the corresponding word is heterotrophs. Its original meaning refers to organisms that live and reproduce only with inorganic compounds as nutrients. In this classical concept, there is no difference between the two metabolic systems, that is, substrate oxidation for energy and nutrient reduction for carbon assimilation.
Today, this concept has been classified according to the nutrients oxidized into energy and their oxidation forms (chemosynthetic organisms, photosynthetic organisms, inorganic oxidizing organisms and organic oxidizing organisms), according to the intake mode of carbon source nutrients and the synthesis mode of organic metabolites necessary for reduction and assimilation. And it is widely used only in the latter sense.