Method: I will be slicing 5 potato cylinders of the same size but with a different surface area and place each one into a test tube. After I put them inside the test tube I will measure with a pipette a certain amount of hydrogen peroxide and add it onto each test tube equally. I will do this so the experiment doesn’t get affected by a wrong variable. Once this is done on all 5 test tubes I will start the timer and record the height of froth on each test tube every minute for 10 minutes.
It is important to notice that I will be measuring the froth as fairly as possible, as it will be deeper on certain parts of the test tube. I will have to make the recordings quickly as there are 5 test tubes and it will take some time to take the recordings of all of them.
Results Table:
Conclusion: It seems that the larger the surface area, the more reactions that are happening on the surface of the potato at any one time in the experiment between the hydrogen peroxide and the catalase from the cut up piece of the potato, creating more froth showed by the height increase in the table previously shown.
It seems that my hypothesis on how the experiment was going to turn out was right, as the potato piece with the larger surface area ended up with higher measurements of froth on the top of the test tube.
The reaction could have probably been sped up by changing other variables but we just did the surface area one, which affected how many reactions happened at any one time between the enzyme and the substrate. This made more oxygen bubbles.
Evaluation: Some results showed higher results than others in terms of the height of the froth and the time interval between each one. Some created a lot of froth in shorts amount of time while others created little amounts of froth in long periods of time. The reason for this could be measured by different variables.
One of them could be the amount of hydrogen peroxide added to each test tube. Maybe I did not measure it properly and inserted different amounts of hydrogen peroxide in each test tube. For this reason the amount of reactions happening in each test tube could have differed since there was a difference in the ratios in each test tube.
Another reason for some of them results being different from others could be because I could not measure the lengths of the potatoes properly. Maybe some of the potato slices were longer than others and therefore more or less cells were present during the reaction depending on the potato and less oxygen bubbles were created during the reaction between the hydrogen peroxide and the cut cells on the surface of the potato slices in each one.
The last problem I encountered was the fact that I measured the froth from different places. When the froth was being created, the height was different from different angles of the test tube and therefore I could have measured the results inaccurately. This greatly affects the results but I tried to measure it from the same place as many times as possible to make the experiment fair.
