Potato Osmosis Lab Report

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Pages: 4

Osmosis in Potato inquiry
Introduction
Cell membranes are permeable to water and all cell membranes are selectively permeable. This means some substances are allowed to enter the interior of the cell and some substances are not allowed to enter the interior of the cell. Osmosis is the movement of water across membranes to balance solute. Osmosis moves water from a hypotonic area to a hypertonic area, also known as diffusion. This process is especially important in a plant cell because it allows for water uptake, stability, and photosynthesis. Osmosis safeguards cells and structure within a plant to make sure it has correct water pressure and is able to maintain posture. Like our potato, because potatoes are the tubers of the potato plant.
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The concentrations of 1%, 5%, and 10% sucrose is a hypotonic solution, that is why the potato pieces would gain mass. Originally, we hypothesized that the potato pieces would gain weight in a sucrose solution regardless of the concentrations because we assumed that it was hypertonic to the potato. In conclusion to these results our hypothesis was not validated. If someone were to predict the diffusion process between potatoes vs. sucrose based on these results and the equation that we have then it is apparent that there is 10.18% sucrose within the potato. This would be the reason the potato is more hypertonic in the 1%, 5%, 10% sucrose, and distilled water and hypotonic to the 15% sucrose. In a different light our graph is decreasing in the way we predicted as long as it as a trend line in place. The problems that could have affected our results was the disorder around the experiment for example: the beakers were not ready before the potato pieces were, so while we prepared the beakers we were holding the already cut potato in our hands. This means the contact between our hands and the potatoes affected the initial mass of the potato because due to heat from our hands made the potatoes swivel up a little bit. Further research and 2-4 more experiments could have been done to improve our