Hi. It's Mr. Andersen. And welcome to the AP Biology Lab 1 walkthrough. This
lab is on two things. It's on diffusion and osmosis. And the diffusion portion of this
lab we're actually just going to do a demonstration. And the osmosis lab we'll do the potato lab.
So we're going to put potatoes in different concentrations of sugar water. But let me
quickly define what diffusion and osmosis are. Diffusion is going to be movement of
molecules from an area of high concentration to low concentration. So if I were to remove
this lid on the top of the perfume, the perfume molecules are going to move from an area of
high concentration inside the bottle to low concentration, in the air. And so pretty soon
you'd be able to smell that perfume just due to diffusion. Now osmosis is a specific type
of diffusion. It's movement of water. And so we're going to study that in this lab using
potatoes and sugar water. And so let me go into a little more depth on those two processes.
First one is diffusion. Diffusion is, best example would be right here. Let's say we
have this jar. And this jar is separated in the middle using a membrane. And that membrane
is porous. In other words it allows material to move back and forth. Well if I were to
let it sit here at time 0 and come back at time 15 minutes what we're going to find is
that on this side we have sugar water. On this side we could have less sugar water.
Or almost distilled water on this side. If we let it sit for 15 minutes however those
sugar molecules are going to start to migrate over here on to this side. So when we come
back it's going to be in equal concentration of sugar on either side. Now the water would
have also been flowing. But the water and the sugar are going to move back and forth
and it's essentially going to be isotonic on either side of that membrane. That's diffusion.
It's simply movement of molecules from an area of high to an area of low concentration.
Now osmosis is a specific type of diffusion. It's the movement of only water across a semi-permeable
membrane. So how does that work? Well let's say we have the same set up. Different container.
But it's got semi-permeable membrane down the middle. This only allows the movement
of water but it doesn't allow the movement of those solute molecules. Well you can see
right here that this side over here is going to be hypertonic. In other words it has more
solute on that side. And less water. This side over here is going to be hypotonic. And
so if we let it sit now for another 15 minutes, it's going to magically raise on this side.
And the reason why is that water is going to flow from an area of high water concentration
to low water concentration. Now what aren't the sugar molecules moving? It's because they
can't move through that membrane. And so this would be osmosis. It would be the flow of
water across a semi-permeable membrane. And so we'll see how that plays out in just a
second. And so the first part of this lab is the diffusion lab. In this diffusion lab
we're going to do essentially a quick demonstration. And so to do this you're going to use dialysis
tubing. So we're going to have dialysis tubing on this side. Dialysis tubing is a little
bit of tubing that's used in kidney dialysis. It's essentially, it looks just like plastic
but it's going to have tiny little holes in it. Tiny little pores in it that you can't
see. And then we're going to have a beaker. Now in the beaker we're going to put water
or H2O. And then we're going to put a chemical called IKI. IKI essentially has iodine inside
of it. So in the beaker all we've got is water and IKI. Inside the dialysis tubing we're
going to have water. We're going to have glucose. Glucose remember is a simple sugar. It's a
monosaccharide. So it's going to just have one sugar. We could test for the presence
of glucose using something called testate. We put it into the solution. We're going to
find that there's going to be glucose inside there. And then we're going to have starch.
Now starch is a polysaccharide. So instead of just one sugar molecule it's going to be
sometimes hundreds if not thousands of sugar molecules that are attached together. Starch
is going to be that sugar that you find in stuff like pasta. And so inside here we've
got water, starch and glucose. Outside no glucose. Now we're going to let it sit for,
I do this during class. So we let it sit for about 40 minutes. Before I show you what happens
I should also remind you this. We can test for the presence of glucose using test tape.
Which is simply a little bit, it almost looks like litmus paper. But to test for the presence
of starch, if IKI and starch are ever in the same place at the same time it's going to
turn this bluish color. So let's see what happens. An hour later it's going to look
like this. And so in class I ask students to figure out, you know, what's going on?
Why do we get this blue color on the inside? What has moved back and forth? And so basically
when we test it when it's done we'll find that there's glucose again inside the dialysis
tubing. Makes sense because it was there before. There's starch. There's water. But we can
infer that IKI has moved inside. And how do we know that? Well starch and IKI if they're
ever in the same place at the same time we're going to get this blue color. On the outside
we could test and we'll find that there's a presence of glucose inside here. There's
IKI like there was before. There's water. But there's no starch on the outside. How
do we know there's no starch? Well there's no blue color on the outside. And so we could
figure out the size of all these molecules in relation to the sizes in the holes in the
dialysis tubing. In other words are the holes inside the dialysis tubing bigger than the
IKI? For sure. Because the IKI was able to move on the outside in. Are they bigger than
the starch? No. Because the starch is not able to make it's way out. And so what we're
showing here is diffusion. What's the one thing that we didn't talk about the movement
of? That would be water. In order to figure out if water is moving or not we'd have to
mass it before and mass it after and see if there's a change in mass. Alright. Let's get
to the actual potato lab. In the potato lab what you're going to do is you're going to
core potatoes. So you're going to basically cut out a little core of a potato like that.
We usually use about 3 of those inside there. And then you're going to put them into a beaker
that's containing different amounts of sugar concentration. And so we're going to put it
in distilled water. 0 molar. 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 molar. So this is a ton of sugar
inside it. We're going to get the mass of them on day 1. And then we're going to get
the mass of them on day 2. So this would be like the mass on day 1. This is the mass on
day 2. And so if we think about osmosis and what's going on, well in the distilled water
you can see here that on day 1 the mass of those two potato cores was 4.74 grams. And
then on day two it's 6.14 grams. And so what's happening? Well if you put the potatoes inside
distilled water, they're gaining mass. Why are they gaining mass? It's due to osmosis.
In other words water is flowing into the potatoes. Because it's moving from an area of high water
concentration outside the potato to low water concentration on the inside. Or from hypotonic
to hypertonic. If we look at the 0.2, the 0.2 is also increasing mass. If we graph this
out. But as we look at the 0.4, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 we find that it's actually losing mass.
In other words it's shriveling out. Why is that? Well if we put it in real sugary water,
high molarity water, what we're finding is that now the water instead of moving into
the potato is actually moving from the potato out. And so you can see here that there's
like a best fit line. If I were to draw it I'd put the best first line somewhere like
that. And so basically what you can figure out is that point at which this line crosses
the axis, that would be 0% change in mass. And so we can really figure out the molarity
of potato. Because if you took a potato with the molarity of, I don't know what this is,
like right around 0.3 molar and we were to put in 0.3 molar, it's going to have movement
of water back and forth but it's not going to relatively change its mass. And so that's
the potato lab. That's diffusion. And I hope that's helpful.