Diffusion And Osmosis Lab Report

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Brookelyn Snider Biology Lab 261 The Effect of Diffusion and Osmosis on White Potato vs. Sweet Potato Introduction: The purpose of this experiment was to develop an understanding of water—solute balance. In this experiment, sweet potatoes and white potatoes were used as model systems. (Bio 261 Lab Manual) Diffusion is the movement of particles from an area of a higher concentration to one of a lower concentration. In this experiment this would be the movement of particles from the potato to the sucrose solution or from the sucrose solution into the potato. Osmosis is the diffusion of water from a hypotonic solution into a hypertonic solution across a selectively permeable membrane. All cells…show more content…
A solution is hypotonic if the concentration of solutes is greater inside the cell than outside. A solution is hypertonic if the concentration of solutes is greater outside of the cell than inside. (http://study.com/academy/lesson/hypertonic-solution-definition-effect-example.html) A solution is two substances that are mixed together. One of them is called the solute and one is the solvent. The solute is the substance that is dissolved. The solvent is the one that the solute is being dissolved into. (http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/bp/ch3/solution.html) The greater the concentration of water there is in the solution, the greater the amount of water enters the potato cylinder by osmosis. Vice versa, the smaller the concentration of water in the solution, the greater the amount of water that leaves the potato cylinder. In this experiment there were 6 different sucrose solutions being used, each containing a different concentration of sucrose. As the concentration of sucrose increases, the mass of the potato should increase since the sucrose solution is a hypertonic solution. Hypothesis: My partners and I hypothesized that the white potato is hypotonic to all sucrose solutions and will gain…show more content…
We designed an experiment to test our hypothesis. We first used a cork borer to get cylinders of potato. We pushed the burer through the potato, twisting as we pushed so the burer was full of potato. We then removed the burer and pushing the potato out of the burer. We obtained 12 cylinders of both kinds of potatoes, white and sweet potato. We cut the cylinders into pieces about 5cm long and then placed them into a petri dish so they did not dry out. We then lined the cylinders up and cut them using a razor blade in pieces about 1-2 mm thick. We then weighed the pieces to the nearest 0.01 grams. Recorded the starting weight at time=0, then transferred them into the beaker containing 100mL of the appropriate solution; we had two beakers with the same sucrose solution. We repeated this process for all of the potato cylinders. We left the cylinders in the sample for 10-minute time trials. After 10 minutes, we removed the cylinders from the beaker gently dabbing them on a paper towel then getting their weight again. We again recorded the weight sat 10 minutes. And we did this for 30 minutes. We did the experiment for all of the white potato cylinders, then went back and repeated the experiment for the sweet potato cylinders. We were sure to record the weight every 10 minutes for 30

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