BIOL 110 Name: Brandon Dutrow
Section C62 (CRN-51060) Date of Experiment: 06/19/2017
Summer 2017 Date of Submission: 07/05/2017
Experiment #7: Determining Tonicity of Solutions as Compared to Decalcified Eggs
Abstract:
Osmosis is the tendency of molecules of a solvent to pass through a semipermeable membrane, from an area of higher concentration to that of a lower concentration. The following experiment was designed to utilize this principle in order to determine the tonicity of a set group of solutions, as they related to eggs. In this experiment, decalcified eggs were placed into four different solutions, with mass measurements of the egg taken at fifteen minute intervals for a total
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Brownian Motion is responsible for passive transport, which does not require an input of energy in the form of ATP (Dalton 2016). There are two types of passive transport, including passive diffusion (simple diffusion) and facilitated diffusion. Facilitated diffusion is a diffusion of a solute through a membrane and down a gradient with the aid of a transport protein. Osmosis is a type of facilitated diffusion where water diffuses through a membrane through an area an area with more water to an area of less water (Solomon 2014). If the solute cannot move, water movement can make the cell shrink or swell as water leaves or enters the cell. For the purposes of this …show more content…
The tonicity of solution relative to eggs in water and the 0.5M glucose were hypotonic, because each egg increased in mass over 60 minutes. The tonicity of the eggs in 1.5M glucose and 2.0M glucose were hypertonic because each egg decreased in mass over 60 minutes. The water moved towards the hypertonic solution through the membrane of the egg in the water and 0.5M glucose solutions, causing the egg to increase in mass. The water moved out of the hypotonic membrane in a hypertonic 1.5M and 2.0M glucose solutions, which caused the egg to decrease in mass.
Relevance Osmosis can be found in many forms throughout everyday human life. For example, meat and fruits are preserved in salt and sugar, respectively. In these cases, the solute concentration is higher than that of the bacterial cytosol. The result of this state is that the bacteria, which would normally consume and deteriorate the food, cannot survive as the water will leave their cells to enter the area of increased concentration. The osmosis studied in this experiment illustrates why the bacteria cannot survive, as the eggs in the hypertonic solution lost volume, as a bacteria in salt or sugar would (Janardan