Osmosis Lab Report

Introduction
Regulating the water in living organisms is very important. Throughout the body, water transports nutrients and removes excretory products. The human’s total body weight is about sixty to seventy percent water (age, gender and weight can be a factor in this statistic along with many others). Furthermore, water is very crucial to living organisms, because it maintains the body temperature and metabolizes body fat. If your body doesn’t receive enough water, it will take water from other areas and this causes the blood to thicken. Plants also need water to grow and survive. Plants also need water for photosynthesis, to be able to create their food. The water travels up to the plant’s stem, where photosynthesis takes place. Water is
vital in living organisms and is needed to survive.
Background Information
Osmosis is the process by which molecules of a solvent pass through a semipermeable membrane from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated solution.
Consequently, osmosis is leveling the concentrations on both sides of the membrane. However, the higher the temperature is, the higher osmosis will perform within the plant cell. When the molecules are heated, they start to move faster, causing osmosis to perform faster than at a neutral temperature. Temperature is just one of the many factors that can affect osmosis, such as, the pressure (the less pressure, the molecules will move leisurely over the gradient) of molecules and the surface area of the molecules (the smaller the surface area, the more the molecules are delimited to move across the gradient, causing osmosis to slow down). In addition, pure water is always hypotonic solution, meaning that the pure water will cross the vegetables’ semipermeable membrane and level the concentration on both sides. Nevertheless, isotonic solutions eventuate when the two solutions emulate each other at equilibrium, and hypertonic solution is the propensity for water to flow out of the cell to help balance the concentration of the
solutes.
Plants are eukaryotic organisms that perform photosynthesis and contain a nucleus.
The functions of the nucleus in a plant cell are to coordinate the cell’s activity and store the genetic material. Ultimately, plants perform photosynthesis because plants contain chlorophyll. Chlorophyll empowers the cells to use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugars and carbohydrates through photosynthesis. Presumably, plant cells contain storage vacuoles that store water and they contain ribosomes that make proteins in the cell. Plant cells have a main structure that differentiates the cell from animal cells. This structure is a cell wall and the function of the cell wall provides protection and support for the plant. The cell wall gives the plant its configuration and sifts through what goes in and out of the cell. Celery is the plant that is being used to conduct this experiment, because this plant is sturdy and petioles that are easy to see. Petioles are “pipes” that conduct water and nutrients in a stalk of celery. In addition, celery is also a stem plant and this has been a controversial topic for many people, due to them being called
‘stalks’.
This project will be testing the effect of temperature on osmosis of a plant cell. The plant cell that is being used is celery. The plant structure is very important, because the storage vacuole in this cell is needed to hold water as it is being submerged underwater for about 8 hours. The plant cells are gaining water and the storage vacuole is expanding in size, because pure water is hypotonic. The cell wall is holding the plant cell together, while osmosis is occurring. Celery has a semipermeable membrane that only allows water to come through the plant cell. Temperature is being used as a factor to influence the change of mass on the celery. Therefore, the independent variable is temperature and the dependent variable is the change in mass.