Purpose: To study the effect of environmental changes in the permeability of living beet root cells.

Procedure A: The effect of pH on the cell membrane

1. Cut a beet root into slices approximately 2mm thick. Use a cork bore to cut out thirty-five (35) slices.

2. Place the discs in a 250 mL beaker and rinse thoroughly in cool running tap water. The red pigment collected comes from the damaged cells and can be used to analyze the chemical nature of the pigment.

3. The pigment in a beet, anthocynanin, should be analyzed before beginning. This can be done simply by first adding a few drops if concentrated acid to a sample if beet juice.

4. The resulting solution can be compared to a second sample made by adding a few drops if concentrates base to another sample of beet juice. Note the colours of each. Given stock solutions of 0.1 mol/L HCl and 0.1 mol/L NaOH, and graduated cylinders, prepare the following solutions in separate test tubes.

colour throughout shade of solution of through- through- yellow

The control our group designed for this investigation was to have one test tube with 10 mL of distilled water 2 mL of ethanol. This way both test tubes would have a total of 12 mL and 5 beet roots each.

A cell membrane reacts differently to it's surrounding, which causes either a life or death situation for the cell. A pH with a very high, or a very low concentration, will cause damage to the cell, where a medium pH level will do very minimum damage to the cell. When damage is done to the cell, osmosis and diffusion become easier for outside solutions. When a cell reaches equilibrium (with water) it creates osmosis pressure. Osmosis pressure is when the hydrostatic pressure from inside the cell is greater then the pressure from outside the cell. Organic solvents also affect the permeability of the cell. Ethanol is miscible with water and both posses hydrogen bonds.

-beets did not move when agitated, they remained at the bottom of the test tube

Some common words found in the essay are:
Designing Control, NaOH NaOH, Materials Method, Materials Methods, Mixture Observations, OA1 Swanson, Dilution Intervals, HCl HCl, 10 ml, Observations Analyzing, beet root, test tube, lost lost, cell membrane, mol/l hcl, pigment lost, 01 mol/l, 15 minutes, pigment pigment, lost lost lost, pigment pigment pigment, -slightly -slightly -slightly, sample beet juice, hcl 10 ml, Organic Solvent,
Approximate Word count = 1374
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)