Tonicity Lab Report

In biology, tonicity refers to the salt-water balance of a system between a permeable membrane such as the cell membrane (Campbell, 132). Tonicity is directly related to the movement of water from an area of lower solute concentration to an area of higher solute concentration, in order to reach a dynamic equilibrium. The three general states of tonicity are hypo-tonic, iso-tonic, and hyper-tonic. Hypotonic solutions are lower in concentration as compared to another solution. There will be a net movement of water into the solution with higher solute concentration. If we take the example of a cell culture, pure water has a lower solute concentration than the inside of the cell so adding pure water to the cells will cause movement of water into …show more content…
Replenishing blood volume with distilled water will have disastrous effects on the body just because distilled water is very hypotonic to cells. Yes, viruses and bacteria are important considerations, but so is the outcome of cell lysis due to massive osmosis into the cell if a patient is given hypotonic …show more content…
al.’s 2017 paper discussing the effect of tonicity on red blood cell sickling in patients with sickle cell disease, it was found that hypo and isotonic solutions work best in in-vivo modeling of vaso-occulsive episodes. In times of hypoxia, oftentimes patients with sickle cell disease can experience increased deformations of their red blood cells, which an adhere to the microvasculature of bones or the spleen and cause pain. Before this review, it was unsure how tonicity of intravenous replacement fluid impacted the resolution of the pain episodes. Carden and his team used human blood to determine that hypotonic and isotonic fluids help to decrease the “stickiness” of RBCs and limit their aggregation, while hypertonic fluid increased it. This paper led to the start of a much larger clinical study to determine how tonicity effects symptoms in hospitalized patients with vaso-occlusive