An experiment that involves potatoes, water, and salt are conducted to prove that there’s an osmosis reaction in a plant cell, which is in this case it’s a potato. Osmosis is a process where there’s a movement of molecules in dissolve component such as water from a high concentration to a lower concentration with a membrane selective permeable. It operates like a gate where it allows and separates certain things to go inside specifically dissolve substance such as water. The experiment started by putting both same sized potato to each beaker that filled with water and salt water solution. Due to osmosis water, it will flow to where there is a higher concentration of solvent and the solvent will flow to where there is less concentration. When putting the salt water, the water will flow out of the cell because it will dilute the extra solvent (salt) outside the cell. And when putting the fresh water, It will rush in because there is more solvent in the cell.
It is predicted before the experiment was conducted, the potato that was places inside the beaker with salt water will shrink due to molecules of salt solution are joined more tightly together than in fresh water. A large number of salt entered the cells of the potato, more water exits the cell ( like in the hypertonic solution) causing the cell to snivel or die causing the potato to shrink.
Proving the osmosis theory, only uses a couple of things which includes independent variables; Beaker, measuring tube, Measuring weight, Stopwatch and dependent variables; Potato, Salt and Water. The first and most important step is that to cut the potato into the same size, because at the end, it’ll show the difference of size between both potatoes. Making sure that the potato is the same size, it’s better to measure it with measuring weight to make sure that they’re in the same weight to begin with. Then, measure the amount of salt that’s going to be inserted in one of the beaker. In this case, it’s 5 tea spoon of salt which is the same as 30g. Then prepare the two beakers and fill it with 200ml of water each. Making sure that it’s the same amount of water in each beaker, using the measuring tube to be more precise. Stir the beaker until the salt is dissolve and begin to put the potatoes to each beaker at the same time while starting the timer to 60 minutes. Since it’s quite a long time, from this process it is necessary to observe both of the potatoes.
After an hour, immediately put the water inside the measuring tube to figure out the difference between both water after it was surrounded by the salt solution and also after the potato was inside the water (with no salt). Do it one by one and slowly is more effective because it’s less likely to spill. If so, it’ll ruin the entire experiment. After both water has already been measured moving on to wight the potato to find out what happened to the potato when it’s surrounded by both water and salt water. Here’s the result after the experiment was conducted:
As it was predicted before the experiment was conducted, the potato that was placed inside the beaker with salt water will shrink due to molecules of salt solution are joined more tightly together than in fresh water. A large number of salt entered the cells of the potato, more water exits the cell (like in the hypertonic solution) causing the cell to snivel or die causing the potato to shrink. In this experiment it says from the table that the mass of the potato decreases by 1g. Which is not supposed to happen in this experiment. The potato that is in the salt water should increase their volume, length and mass. This happens because the cell membrane in cells is semi permeable and the vacuole contains a salt solution. So when a cell is located in distilled water (high water concentration) water will move across the semi permeable membrane into the cell (lower water concentration) by osmosis, making the cell swell to carry extra water. If this process were done with the potato cell, it’ll more likely to increase in length, volume, and mass due to the extra water.