Spinach Lab Report

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The results verified that the spinach had the highest chloroplasts concentration because it had the absorbency of 0.730, 0.826, 1.011, and 1.049 as shown in Table 1-4. The spinach was our positive control because, from a previous experiment, we knew that it would have chloroplasts; the buffer sucrose was the negative control because if the cabbage or lettuce did not have any contents of chloroplasts, then the readings should be equivalent to the buffer sucrose since it was our blank solution. Therefore, it should read 0.00, if there were no contents of chloroplasts. On the other hand, there was a flux in the data between the cabbage and the lettuce. However, the overall data suggested that the cabbage had a higher content of chloroplasts than …show more content…

The chloroplasts within the spinach were triggered by the light in the room, as the function of chloroplasts is to induce photosynthesis. A similar experiment was tested by Clapper and Sallee. They concluded that the rate of photosynthesis of the spinach solution was greater than it was in both the cabbage and lettuce. Clapper and Sallee stated that the red cabbage and lettuce may have had slower growth rates, which was why the chloroplasts concentration plateaued after 5 minutes from the first reading. In Table 4, we tested the concentration of each plant at a wavelength of 500nm to see if we’d get a better reading. The same results showed that spinach had the highest concentration of chloroplasts and lettuce had the least concentration. In spite of it all, there has been debate over the accuracy of calibrating the chloroplasts concentration through a spectrophotometer because some scientists argued that low contents of chlorophyll a were more sensitive at a wavelength of 675nm compared to a wavelength at 550nm (Xue and Yang,

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