Chloroplast Experiment Essay

For part one of the experiment, my team asked the question of which cell fraction of the measured pea seedlings will have a higher ratio of chloroplasts? My group tested for the activity of chloroplasts with three different pairs of cell fractions by two conditions of light and dark in three readings. The first two cell fractions, pellet one and two (P1, P2), are the hard sediments found at the bottom of a tube after it has been centrifuged (which are specimen, like the mitochondria and chloroplast, that are isolated from the rest) (Leicht and McAllister, 2016). The last cell fraction used was the supernatant two (S2), which is just the free liquid surrounding the pellet after the centrifuging of P2 (Leicht and McAllister, 2016). To test for this, DCIP (a chloroplast isolation buffer) was used to

The hypothesis for this experiment was that the cell fraction in the cuvette marked P2 will have more chloroplast activity because it will exhibit greater color change and differences in the absorbance readings compared to the other cuvettes when exposed under the condition of light; moreover, this notion was believed to be so because the more a cell fraction is centrifuged, the more intact chloroplasts we’ll find (Leicht and McAllister,

This meant that this cuvette (tested under light) should display a higher decrease in DCIP due to the reduction in absorbance (dependent variable) opposed to the other cell fractions tested depending on a sixteen minute period (independent variable). The overall goal was to provide proof, through data, that the cell fractions put under the light during the sixteen minute period would indicate a higher set of chloroplast activity versus the ones put in the