preview

Potato Osmosis Lab Report

Good Essays

Osmosis, the diffusion of water through a semi-permeable membrane, shows that water tends to flow from a hypoosmotic environment to a hyperosmotic environment. There are many proposed explanations for why and in what context this osmosis occurs. One explanation is a “concentration of particles” explanation called van’t Hoff’s Law. This law states that the size of a particle will not change the water potential or occurrence of osmosis in a solution-submerged cell, only the amount of the solute in the solution will affect osmosis. To test this, we used three different sized solutes—sucrose, glucose, and NaCl—to see if the size of the solute had an effect on the osmosis of water into or out of white potato cells that were submerged in solutions containing the 3 solutes. We found that the size of the particles of solute does not affect osmosis of water into or out of the potato cells, only the amount of particles present in the outside solution, thus supporting van’t Hoff’s Law.
Introduction

In this lab, the concentrations of different solutions were used to display the effect different sizes and different amounts of solute would have on the movement of water into or out of white potato cells.
For this lab, white potatoes were used to find the effect of the size of particles on the osmosis and water potentials of the potatoes. The simplicity of the potato and the ease of access made them good, constant variables for the experiment. The average expected water potential for the

Get Access