Osmolality Lab

The purpose of this lab was to determine the concentration of NaCl or sodium chloride that is isotonic to elodea cells. First off, what is osmosis? Osmosis is this huge net of molecules moving through semi-permeable membrane to high concentration to direction where everything becomes balanced. This brings us to what osmolality is. Osmolality is related to osmosis and we know that osmosis has something to do with water so that being said, osmolality is number of osmoles of solute per liter in solution. So, what does osmolality depend on? It mostly depends on number of particles in chemical solution but not the identity of molecules and ions. Since we were dealing with elodea and NaCl (which is M) and were trying to figure out which molarity would cause us to get isotonic solution. Based on the experiments that we before trying to figure out the isotonic solution, we were doing hypotonic and hypertonic solutions, so we had a slight idea what to do and Mr.
We always had to use 10mL of distilled water so subtracting 10 from 2.5, we would get 7.5 mL of distilled water and 2.5mL of NaCl. Getting a little leaf from pond water, and slides, we put the leaf on the slide and a drop of distilled water with NaCl and then got it under the microscope to see how the elodea cells looked like, if they were shriveled up, that would be the solution is hypertonic and if the cells looked like they were going to explode, that means the solution is hypotonic and if it looked like neither, that means it would be isotonic. In this case though, the solution turned out to be hypertonic because the cells looked shriveled up. We tested about 4 conditions, 0.01 M, 0.1M, 0.15M, and 0.25M. Our controls were pond water, distilled water and NaCl because those were the main solutions added to find the hypotonic, hypertonic, and