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Osmolarity

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document in english

biology

presentation

published 17/09/2007

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level : General public

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Summary

One of the most fascinating systems of a cell or an organism is the way it deals with water. Every living needs water to survive and manages the intake of this precious resource differently. Water diffuses through a selectively permeable membrane within a cell by the process of osmosis (Campbell, 145). Osmosis ensures that a cell’s environment is healthy by regulating the solute and solvent concentration. A solute is a substance dissolved into another substance and a solvent is a substance into which something is dissolved, forming a solution. Water is the most functional and well known solvent and affects the state of a cell body.

Introduction
1. One of the most fascinating systems of a cell or an organism is the way it deals with water
2. All of this ties into how organisms themselves regulate two of their essential components, salt and water
3. In our experiment we used Mercenaria mercenria, also known as hard clams, as our osmoregulators.
4. I also predicted that the clam, being an osmoregulator would not experience much change in weight across the different salinities.
Methods
Results
1. As can be seen in Table 1 as well as in Table 2a, in which we are known as group 1, our clam's weights changed by minuscule amounts over the course of an hour.
2. When looking at the whole class as a whole, Graph 2 very vividly shows how the worms were not able to stabilize their salinity levels and changed by a much steeper margin than the clams
Discussion
1. If the environmental conditions around the worms had occurred with salt concentrations much lower than those used in the lab, they would have died due as their cells would burst from all the excess water
2. Since the worm data was given to us instead of us finding it out ourselves, there was no way to know if we would have been able to duplicate the same results.