Abstract The purpose of this experiment is to test for mitochondrial activity by isolating different organelles using the differential centrifugation process. Studying mitochondria is extremely important because they control the death and life of the cell by regulating the apoptotic signals (Frezza et al 2007). Also they are responsible for the metabolic reactions (aerobic respiration) and the production of ATP (Frezza et al 2007). Three hypotheses were formed based on my knowledge. First, it was hypothesized that test tube "A", the control, would not show any red concentration, test tube "B" which contains supernatant II would show the most red concentration and test tube "C" which contains sediment II would only show a little red concentration. The second hypothesis states that the raw corn kernels would have mitochondrial activity while the boiled corn kernels would not. The last hypothesis interprets that the "gunk" and sediment I will both contain starch granules. It was only expected to find mitochondrial activity in Supernatant II. Unfortunately, after performing this experiment, we were not able to support this hypothesis and come up with a conclusion. A possible explanation for why there was no mitochondrial activity observed in the boiled corn kernels might be because increasing the temperature would disintegrate dehydrogenases and thus they wouldn't function as efficient or they …show more content…
For instance, we could not conclude that mitochondrial activity is present in Supernatant II. However, our experiment showed that the boiled corn kernels did not undergo any mitochondrial activity while the raw corn kernels did. This might indicate that raising the temperature might have an effect on the function of dehydrogenase. Moreover, our found that starch granules are present in both sediment I and the “gunk”. Indeed, some parts of this experiment were not successful because the procedure was not followed