Nacl Activity Lab Report

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Effects of NaCl on Catechol Oxidase Activity A Catechol Oxidase is an enzyme and enzymes are proteins which are also catalysts, meaning they affect the rate of chemical reactions.(http://sciencelearningcenter.pbworks.com/f/3-Enzymes.pdf). This lab was constructed to observe the relationship of an environmental parameter, for this experiment the effects of NaCl on Catechol Oxidase Activity. Salt concentrations that are close to zero; the enzyme molecules of charged amino acid side chains will attract to each other. This then will cause the enzyme to break apart and form an inactive reaction (http://www.biologyjunction.com/enzyme_catalysis.htm). Another reason a reaction will not to occur is if the salt concentration is too high. A salt concentration…show more content…
For the salt solutions one will need a 15%, 10%, 5%, 2.5%, and a 0% of NaCl concentration. The enzyme solution that one will be using will consist of a potato homogenate that is acting as the catechol oxidase, and distilled water. The substrate solution needed in this experiment will consist of a buffered catechol solution. Aside from the solutions a spectrophotometer is needed in order to calculate the absorbance. One will need six cuvettes are needed in order to put all of the solutions in. Distilled water in order make a mixture that will be a base line and zero out the spectrophotometer. 5 mL of the potato enzyme a milliliter for each of the cuvette solutions. Three pipettes, a pipette for each of the solutions so one can successfully transfer the different solutions and the distilled water into the cuvettes. A sharpie in order to label the tools so they aren’t accidently mixed up. Another important material is parafilm for each cuvette. The paramfilm will stop the toxins from escaping into the air people around are breathing in. In order to start this experiment, one will first number each of the six cuvettes and label one of the pipettes enzyme another distilled water and the last one NaCl. In the first five cuvettes one will put 1 mL of the enzyme solution using the pipette labeled enzyme. Then using the pipette labeled distilled water add 1…show more content…
We believe our results are faulty because they fluctuate too much and do not give us a clear or reasonable data. Also I believe that there was something wrong with the potatoes that were used to extract the catechol enzyme. What we can read from this data is that the enzyme does not go up and then even out, it just fluctuates in the beginning and then levels out. Reading this data collected we can tell that it does not support our hypothesis. We believed that the salt concentrations to a certain point would speed up the reaction. This also doesn’t support our hypothesis because we assumed that because too much salt could destroy the protein that up until a certain concentration it would speed up the reaction and when the salt percentage was too high it would destroy the protein causing there to be no reaction within that concentration. Then once there was too much of the concentration it would have no effect. The data that would have supported our hypothesis is that the salt lower salt concentrations should have increased quickly and then leveled out and the higher concentration should have just slowly leveled out with out a big increase in the beginning. Some questions we still have over this topic are: at what exact percentage of salt concentration does the salt denaturing the protein stopping the effectivity of catechol oxidase activity? In order to determine when a protein

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