Essay On Elodea Plant Cells

From the data, solution A seems to have had the smallest change in the Elodea plant cells, solution B caused some swelling and reduced area between the cell membrane and cell wall of the cells, and solution C caused the internal cell parts including the vacuole to compress together. Solution A resulted in rectangular Elodea plant cells that are uniform throughout, indicating the environment around the cells is isotonic, while solution B resulted in what appears to be large expansions of the cell vacuole which is the green part, resulting in distortion in the bottom half of the image and indicating the surrounding environment of the cells is hypotonic. It is obvious that solution C caused the cell parts to compress, indicating that the cell …show more content…
From these observations, the qualitative data, and the conditions set in the predictions earlier in this report, we conclude that solution A is the pond water, solution B is the distilled water, and solution C is the salt water.
We believe our experimental design was adequate to answer our original question, but the execution of the experiment resulted in some questionable procedural executions and data collection. For example, the data we collected in the form of pictures were not as clear and obvious as we would have liked. Most of this was because of time constraints we had in our class that resulted in us rushing to collect data whereas we should have taken our time and really focused on taking images to get the clearest possible image of the Elodea plant cell. If we had done this, then our pictures of the plant cells after being exposed to solutions A through C would have turned out much like our original image, which we focused a lot of time on taking and resulted in less time for …show more content…
Most importantly, would have spent more time developing our procedure and thinking about the outcomes and how to improve the procedure before we started. This could have led to a better experiment with less uncontrollable variables and faster procedural execution, ensuring the most time for taking pictures. We would have devoted more time to our images, only accepting images that were the same standard of quality as our original Elodea plant leaf cell image. We would have also spent more time making sure that the leaf was exposed to the right solution by comparing the leaf with images of it exposed under the previous solution to ensure that there were some noticeable differences. If we had more time, we would have asked some more questions during the experiment like: Why do the cells change in different environments? What are some indications that the cells are losing or gaining water? How does the cell react to increased solute particles and decreased solute particles in its environments? We answered many of these questions as we were making the lab write-up, but if we had asked and answered these questions during the experiment, we would have gained more insight and it would have helped us identify if the Elodea plant leaf cells were exposed to a different solution than before or not. These would have been the main changes we would have made if our teacher and granted us more time to answer the