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Title: Made an error setting up an osmosis experiment, wondering how I can fix it Post by: derstacker98 on Sep 21, 2014 Hello all,
In my Advanced Biology class (basically AP bio) we were setting up an osmosis experiment when you have to take 4 cylinders of potatoes and find the mass of them before you do anything. Then you put the cylinders in a solution (There are 6 beakers, 24 potato cylinders total) and leave them overnight to weigh the potatoes again, to see what the difference is and observe osmosis in action. Unfortunately, our class was rushed through a few experiments so we messed up on this one. Instead of finding the mass of the potatoes, we found the mass of the potatoes in the solution in the beaker, which makes it so we cannot find the mass difference of the potatoes before and after. How can we fix this? Do we have to do the whole experiment again? Can we find the mass of 4 potato cylinders and use that as our rough estimate of the original mass? Our teacher isn't the most forgiving and understanding person in the world, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead of time! Title: Re: Made an error setting up an osmosis experiment, wondering how I can fix it Post by: bio_man on Sep 21, 2014 How can we fix this? Do we have to do the whole experiment again? Can we find the mass of 4 potato cylinders and use that as our rough estimate of the original mass? I'm afraid not. The purpose is to see how bloated the potato itself got. If you took measurements of the potato and the beaker, and you have the original weight of potato, you can't find the difference. Title: Re: Made an error setting up an osmosis experiment, wondering how I can fix it Post by: savio on Sep 21, 2014 You could make up the results ;)
Just use some experimental values found on the internet. I'm sure you guys are not the first to have conducted such an experiment. Let me understand exactly. 1) You take measurement of a potato. 2) You submerge potato into solution 3) You leave potato in there for a while. 4) You then measure both the potato and the solution together? Title: Re: Made an error setting up an osmosis experiment, wondering how I can fix it Post by: DJR333 on Oct 22, 2014 It sounds like you are learning about hypotonic, isotonic and hypertonic solution. There is no way to do this experiment without starting over. When I did this experiment, we broke up into several groups and we all had similar results.
Maybe another group would let you team up with them because if your instructor was anything like mine, they know the start weight and have values that they expect to see. They would know is you just start making up numbers |