30 Crickets Lab Report

Results
The purpose of this experiment was to identify whether or not the OAT protein within the malpighian tubules transports particles with little specificity other than the requirement that they are organic anions. This was tested through the use of CPR to examine the amount of PAH that is transported by the protein. Because an increased amount of transported PAH would result in a decreased amount of CPR within the tubules due to competition, a data point for this experiment would consist of a tubule, either incubated in a PAH or non-PAH solution, that corresponds to a shade of red within the comparison tray. This comparison tray contains 5 different concentrations of CPR, which are also different shades of red (0.00468 mM, 0.0094 mM, 0.019

Due to time constraints, only a sample size of 20 was able to be obtained. For this experiment there were two groups, a PAH group and a non-PAH group; each of which containing 20 data points. The data points that were observed are as follows:

Figure 1. 20 individual samples of malpighian tubules and their absorption of CPR and PAH (mM).

Figure 2. Average absorption of CPR and PAH (mM) for 20 cricket malpighian tubules. Error bars represents standard deviation.

Figure 3. 2D molecular structures of chlorophenol red (CPR) (left) and para-aminohippuric acid (PAH) (right). Images obtained from PubChem Database. As Figure 1 shows, the shades obtained from tubules in the non-PAH (CPR) group were generally of a darker shade than the tubules obtained from the PAH group. An unpaired t-test was done and a p-value < 0.001 was obtained. This value is below the 0.05 threshold. Therefore, we can conclude that this data was not obtained due to

Because the PAH group of tubules had a lower average shade than the CPR group, it can be inferred that less CPR was able to be transported by the proteins within these tubules. This means that the PAH within the solution of the PAH group competed with the CPR also within the solution and was successfully transported by the OAT protein.

Discussion
Because we did serial dilutions of PAH for our color palate, an issue with how we could analyze our data arose. A shade that falls between two concentrations would not be accurate enough to tell what the true concentration of the sample is.
We suspect that the OAT protein was able to transport both CPR and PAH anions and was proven correct due to the fact that the shade of red was lighter when both CPR and PAH were present, indicating competition between the two molecules. On closer inspection of the 2D molecular structures of CPR and PAH in figure 3, both molecules contain benzene ring(s) with a reactive oxygen group, The hydrogen can be taken off of the oxygen group making both CPR and PAH anions capable of transporting through OAT