Lab Report

About:

This lab was designed to record how the amount of substrate (Hydrogen Peroxide) would affect the enzyme (Bindweed extract). My lab partner and I took the leaves and some stems from the bindweed plant and ground it up in a mortar and pestle until the plant was unrecognizable. We then filtered out excess bindweed mush and used the leftover liquids as the bindweed extract. To see what different types of reactions we would get my lab partner and I took three percent hydrogen peroxide and diluted it with different amounts of water. To get a control group the experiment we took one milliliter of hydrogen peroxide and added it to one milliliter of the plant extract and mixed it in a test tube. When hydrogen peroxide is added to the extract the substrate causes the extract to fizz, if you will, into a white foam, and for every three seconds we would record how much the foam and liquid would rise in centimeters.

Hypothesis:

Our hypothesis was that the more we dilute the hydrogen peroxide the less of an effect it will have on the bindweed extract.

Procedure:

To begin with, my partner and I grabbed some bindweed from the schools garden. Then we ground it up with a mortar and pestle with twenty milliliters of tap water. Once the plant was on recognizable we used a paper towel to filter the liquids into a beaker without the pulp-like bindweed. We took three trials of measuring the mixtures reaction of the extract to the diluted substrate. We added one milliliter of extract then one milliliter of a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide to a test tube and here are our results.

Results:

After twenty seven seconds the mixture that contained three percent hydrogen peroxide rose about 7.1 centimeters. The mixture that was 2.25% hydrogen peroxide stopped at 7 centimeters.

And the mixture that had 1.25% of hydrogen peroxide rose to 5.1 centimeters and leveled out.

Conclusion:

Our hypothesis was correct. There was a distinct negative correlation between the amount of water added to the dilution and how much the mixture rose. Some variables we have to consider are if there was leftover water in the test tube after we rinsed out the original mixture, if the bindweed was clean, and if the class before cleaned their utensils before returning them. All of these variables could have given us different results in the lab if their status was different.