Potato Osmosis Lab Report

In this experiment we are going to be studying the affects of Osmosis in Potatoes. Osmosis is the passage of water from a region of high water concentration through a semi-permeable membrane to a region of low water concentration.

A semi-permeable membrane is a very a very thin layer of material, cell membranes are semi-permeable. These will allow some things to pass through, but will prevent other things from passing through. For example, cell membranes will allow small molecules such as Oxygen, water, Carbon Dioxide, Ammonia, Glucose, amino acids, etc. to pass through. But they will not allow larger molecules such as Sucrose,

Starch, and protein, etc. to pass through.

A region of high concentration of water is either a very

Prediction

While the potato sections are in the solutions osmosis is going to occur. With the distilled water there will be more water in the solution than in the cell itself, so more water will pass through the cell membrane into the cells than pass through out of it. Therefore the cells will swell up, and the overall mass and size of the potato section will increase. With the test tube which has 0.2M concentration, the same amount of water will pass through cell membrane into the cell and from the cell. Therefore the cells will stay the same size, and the mass and size will stay the same. Now with the other test tubes with salt concentration, the opposite is going to occur to what happened with distilled water. Because there is more water in the cells than in the solution, more water is going to pass through the cell membrane from the cells than pass though in to them.

Therefore the cells will shrink and the overall mass and size of the potato section will decrease. The larger the concentration of the salt solution the larger amount of water will pass from the cells into the solution; this is why the cells decrease in size the larger