Potato Osmosis Lab

The purpose of the lab was to investigate osmosis, which was successfully achieved because there was a change in the potato’s mass which was due to the net movement of water either into the potato cells or out of the potato cells. In the 0.400M solution, the potato decreased in mass, this was due to the reason that the solution was hypertonic. There was a higher concentration of solute and lower concentration of water in the solution than there was in the potato cells. This led the water to travel down its concentration gradient, which was from a higher concentration (in the cell) to a lower concentration (in the solution), which meant the potato cells lost water, therefore the potato lost mass. The 0.300M solution was also a hypertonic solution. The only difference is that the concentration of solute was lower than
This meant that the net movement of water was going into the cell, which caused the cell to swell and gain lot of mass because a large quantity of water entered the cell. These results proves that osmosis occurred. Furthermore, the second part of the purpose was to determine the solute concentration of the potato, which was also successfully achieved. The solute concentration of the potato will be equal to the concentration of the solution that caused no net movement of water and change in mass because the concentrations were already at equilibrium. Observing the aforementioned results, the solution that fits this description is the solution with solute concentration of 0.200M, meaning that the concentration of the solute in the potato was 0.200M. As stated earlier in the analysis, that as the concentration of the sucrose solutions increased, the % change of mass decreased. This statement can be evaluated by using the process of